Copyright O 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means: electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging ia P*blicatio* Data Concise encyclopedia of philosophy of language / edited by Peter V. Lamarque ; consulting editor, R. E. Asher. p. cm. ISBN 0-08-042991-2 (hardcover) 1. Language and languages—Philosophy— Encyclopedias. I. Lamarque, Peter. II. Asher, R. E. P106.C5946 1997 401—<lc21 97-28781 CIP British Library Catalog*!** i* Pablicatioa Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0-08-042991-2 (HC)

Editor's Foreword
At the core of this volume are 80 or so articles I commissioned in the late 1980s and early 1990s for the 10-volume Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (ELL), edited by Ron E. Asher (Pergamon, 1994), for which I was the philosophy Subject Editor. These articles were almost exclusively written by professional philosophers and a high proportion by philosophers who are preeminent in the subject about which they write. It would be hard to think of better qualified authors than, for example, Tom Baldwin on theories of meaning, Andrew Brennan on identity, Jonathan Cohen on linguistic philosophy, John Cottingham on rationalism, Mark Crimmins on propositions, Martin Davies on modal logic, Alec Fisher on reasoning, Graeme Forbes on necessity, Elizabeth Flicker on Davidson's philosophy, Sam Guttenplan on the history of logic, Susan Haack on deviant logics, Christopher Hookway on Peirce and Quine, Paul Horwich on truth, Jonathan Lowe on universals, Stephen Read on relevant logic, Mark Sainsbury on Russell, Kim Sterelny on reference, Charles Travis on Wittgenstein, Alan Weir on realism, Tim Williamson on vagueness, Andrew Woodfield on intentionality, and many more besides. This broad spread of expertise gave the philosophy entries in ELL a well-grounded authority in this area, no doubt contributing to the high respect accorded to the work as a whole. When I was invited to edit this Concise Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language, drawing on articles from the original encyclopedia, I had a substantial and impressive core to build on. From there it was a matter of scouring the immense resources of ELL to supplement the core subject; I was confronted with an embarras des richesses. In ELL, I had worked closely with the two semantics Subject Editors, Pieter Seuren and Osten Dahl (whose advice and help I take this opportunity to acknowledge with gratitude) and I have helped myself to many of the articles they commissioned, including their own contributions. However, one serious issue of principle inevitably arose in my process of selection for the Concise Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language: it concerned how narrowly I was to conceive the range of the subject. Even turning to the semantics topics, commissioned by Seuren and Dahl, I found I was for the most part looking at work, not by philosophers as such, but by theoretical linguists. Of course philosophy of language is not the unique preserve of professional philosophers, so that in itself produced no difficulties in principle. In fact, it became increasingly clear to me that there is no sharp line between work done by theoretical linguists and philosophers of language. All share a common interest in foundational questions about meaning, reference, the semantics of natural language, the nature of signs, the distinction between sense and nonsense, the characterization of logical forms, and so on. However, as I expanded my search there was no doubt that I was being tempted beyond even the loose boundary between philosophy of language and other approaches. I make no apology for succumbing to this temptation. Certainly I have included articles mostly, but not exclusively, of an empirical nature, which would not normally count as contributions to the philosophy of language: for example, the articles on Apes and Language, Pragmatics, Language Acquisition in the Child, Negation, and some of the articles on logical topics. My belief is that these strengthen the volume, not only because they are likely to be of interest to philosophers who are not familiar with such work, but because they open up the wider context within which issues of a more strictly philosophical character are debated. Thus it is that I have included work by psychologists, literary critics, formal logicians, empirical linguists, as well as theoretical linguists and philosophers. Within the constraints of the project I have also attempted to spread the net wider than the confines of so-called analytical philosophy; the inclusion of the fascinating article on Indian Theories of Meaning introduces a different cultural perspective and the articles on Deconstruction and Literary Structuralism reveal different intellectual currents within the Western tradition.

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Editor's Foreword

One slight—I think harmless—anomaly in the collection, which directly reflects its origins in a work devoted to language and linguistics, is what might be seen as an imbalance, at times, in favor of linguistics over philosophy. An example of this is in Section IX: Key Figures, where philosophers might be surprised to find entries on Noam Chomsky and Ferdinand de Saussure considerably more substantial than those on, for example, Donald Davidson or Saul Kripke. Of course, comparisons of influence are notoriously hard to make and there is no doubt that Chomsky and Saussure are important figures in philosophy of language; but arguably the influence of Davidson and Kripke is as great, if not more so. However, I was not inclined to tinker with the original contributions, certainly not just for the sake of appearance of parity and not if it meant trimming down valuable articles. The articles on Chomsky and Saussure give an immense amount of illuminating detail which directly engages central issues in philosophy of language and the work of Davidson and Kripke (taking only those two examples) is covered elsewhere in the volume. The fundamental aim of any encyclopedia is to give the readers ready access to basic information on key topics likely to be of interest to them. But there are different kinds of information and different forms of presentation. In this work, articles take different forms and are presented at different levels of technicality, therefore a word about the underlying rationale might be helpful. First of all, the articles are not merely listed in alphabetical order, but are grouped into sections covering major divisions of the subject: Language, Metaphysics, and Ontology; Language and Mind; Truth and Meaning; Reference; Language and Logic; Formal Semantics; Pragmatics and Speech Act Theory; and Key Figures. Within each section the articles are arranged alphabetically and there are often cross-references to other items in the section (or elsewhere), perhaps showing where ideas are further expanded. It is hoped that this division will make this encyclopedia easier to use by highlighting clusters of topics and giving some structure to the whole. Needless to say the divisions are not hard and fast and items could often appear under different headings. Some articles are concerned with particular ideas or specialist terms: for example, A Priori, Category-mistake, Sortal Terms, Analyticity, Holism, Language Game, Entailment, mtentionality, Inflationism, Ontological Commitment, Verificationism, Radical Interpretation, Type/Token Distinction, De Dicto/De Re, Denotation, and so on. The purpose of these entries is, in a relatively concise way, to explain the meanings of the terms and their place in philosophical debates. The information conveyed is of a straightforward explanatory kind, of especial help to those unfamiliar with this basic philosophical terminology. Other articles take the form of surveys of an intellectual territory: for example, Meaning: Philosophical Theories, Indian Theories of Meaning, Semiotics, Literary Structuralism and Semiotics, Logic: Historical Survey, Pragmatics, Speech Act Theory, and the introductory article itself on Philosophy of Language. The point of these is to sketch out an area of enquiry, drawing a map on which specific debates are located and contextualized. The articles often involve accounting for the historical development of ideas. Another kind of survey article tracks, not historically but intellectually, a particular area of contention, perhaps around a problematic concept or hypothesis, perhaps connected to a particular school of thought: for example Deconstruction, Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, Hermeneutics, Semantic Paradoxes, Metaphor, Metaphor in Literature, Rules, Truth, Deviant Logics, Presupposition, and Semantics vs Syntax. These articles are much more likely to contain polemical discussion, assessing rival positions and staking out a point of view of their own. It is worth drawing attention here to the cluster of articles on Speech Act Theory, written by Keith Allan. Together these provide a comprehensive account of the ideas, debates, and controversies in this important branch of the philosophy of language. The divisions into separate articles are largely for ease of access, although anyone who is unfamiliar with the topic could profitably begin with Speech Act Theory: Overview.
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There can be no denying that some articles are technically demanding and will not be readily accessible to those without an adequate background in philosophy and/or symbolic logic. Although for the most part the articles in Section IV: Language and Logic do not give particular prominence to technical symbolism, many from Section VII: Formal Semanticsdo. The simple fact is that formal semantics is "formal" in the sense that it uses the vocabulary and methodology of logic to attempt a rigorous characterization of selected features of natural language. The survey article on Formal Semantics gives a general overview of the central aims of this approach, although here too, some technical language is used. Much philosophy of language draws on work in logic. Indeed this is a feature of analytical philosophy in general, of which philosophy of language has been a core component. Given the presence of these relatively technical articles, it is clear that the intended readership of the volume is diverse, including those already knowledgeable about the subject, seeking to consolidate or build on their knowledge, as well as those looking for basic information orjust starting out. Such is the way with most encyclopedias. It is my hope that this work will be useful to a wide range of readers at all levels of expertise. It aims to be as comprehensive as possible in covering the main issues and concepts in the philosophy of language of the 1990s, to be a resource as a reference work, and also a volume to dip into for the intrinsic interest of the subject matter. The extensive bibliographies on each topic point to sources for further research. As stated previously, earlier versions of all the articles (with the exception of the short article on H.P. Grice) first appeared in the Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. The contributors were invited to modify, update, and edit their articles and many have produced significant changes, not least to their bibliographies. I would like to thank all the contributors for the speed and efficiency with which they cooperated in this process. I would also like to thank the editorial team at Elsevier, in particular Chris Pringle and Janine Smith, for the considerable time and effort they have put into the project, and the constant support and advice they have given me. Peter Lamarque University of Hull September 1997

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SECTION I

Introduction
Philosophy of Language
P. V. Lamarque

Although some of the topics debated within the philosophy of language can be traced back to classical Greek philosophy and the refinements of medieval logic (see Section IX), in fact the label 'philosophy of language' for a distinct branch of the subject did not gain currency until after World War II. Long before then, in the early years of the twentieth century, there had been a clear shift of emphasis in philosophy toward linguistic analysis, which gave a prominence to language within philosophy unprecedented in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but it was not until later that philosophers turned their attention to a systematic study of natural language itself and its foundations. This new inquiry focused on fundamental questions about the nature of meaning, truth, and reference. A convergence of interest developed with theoretical linguistics, spurred on by increasingly sophisticated methods in logic, and the twin areas of semantics and pragmatics came to constitute a central core of analytical philosophy for roughly two decades (the early 1960s to the early 1980s). Since then, to some extent influenced by problems arising from the philosophy of language (on intentionality, prepositional attitudes, mental content, thought), there has been a further shift at the center of philosophy toward philosophy of mind, though debate continues on all disputed issues, especially relating to truth and meaning. The main purpose of this introduction is to identify some of the basic areas of contention within philosophy of language and point to the relevant entries in the encyclopedia where they are taken up.
1. The Twentieth-century Origins of Philosophy of Language

mark of human rationality; without language there would be no possibility of abstract thought or even perhaps self-reflection. The seventeenth-century philosopher Rene Descartes emphasized the connection between language and the human intellect. But these general observations about language and human nature to a large extent presuppose the distinctive qualities of language. The philosophy of language, as a more narrowly conceived inquiry, seeks to identify and define precisely what qualities these are, what it is for something to be a language in the first place. Significantly, Noam Chomsky's work on syntactic structures in the 1950s and 1960s led him to reexamine traditional philosophical debates about the 'speciesspecific' nature of language and the way that language learning has a bearing on fundamental disputes in epistemology. The articles on Chomsky, Rationalism and Innate Ideas follow, up that debate. For the historical background of philosophical concerns with language, see the first part of Section IX; several articles in Section II explore the metaphysical and methodological background. 1.1 Philosophy of Language and Linguistic Philosophy As late as 1969, with the publication of Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language, John Searle felt the need to emphasize the difference between the philosophy of language and 'linguistic philosophy,' under the assumption that the latter was much more familiar to his readers. In the 1990s, with linguistic philosophy no longer preeminent, probably the opposite assumption might more reasonably be made; but the fact remains that the two are distinct in important ways. Linguistic philosophy, which had its origins in the logical analysis of Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and G. E. Moore at the beginning of the twentieth century, was largely a revolution in method, allied to a view about the nature of philosophy. A powerful underlying thought was that philosophical problems—even those of the most traditional kind, about knowledge, ontology, morality, metaphysics—are at a deep level really problems
1

Not just any connection between philosophy and language constitutes the subject matter of the philosophy of language. Philosophy in one form or another has always had things to say about language. For example, language (with a sufficiently complex syntactic and generative structure) has been thought to be the distinguishing feature of human beings, a

Introduction about language and thus that the best way to approach those problems is to analyze the meanings of relevant concepts and propositions; these analyses, so it was claimed, are likely to show either that the problems are spurious or that they can be illuminated by revealing otherwise unnoticed logical or conceptual relations. In contrast to this, philosophy of language is not a kind of method but a kind of subject matter (i.e., focusing on language and meaning themselves). Nor does it rest on any polemical view about the nature of philosophical problems. For a closer look at the characteristics of linguistic philosophy, see Linguistic Philosophy. 1.2 Logical Analysis and Philosophy of Language Although philosophy of language is distinct from linguistic philosophy, there is no doubt that many of the problems addressed by philosophers of language can be traced back to problems connected to logical analysis. Indeed Frege, whose principal work was in the foundations of mathematics and in the development of first-order logic, is widely regarded as the father figure of modern philosophy of language. Frege's new logical symbolism for representing different kinds of judgments—universal and existence statements, identities, conditional statements, and so forth—and his adaptation of the mathematical notation of functions, quantifiers, and variables to sentences of natural languages not only revolutionized the representation of logical patterns of inference but made it possible for the first time to provide a truly perspicuous representation of a sentence's logical form as distinct from its surface grammatical form. At the heart of logical analysis was the search for logical forms. Many of the areas to which the new logic was applied—anaphora, tense, adverbial modification, identity, definite description, propositional attitude verbs, indexicality, modality—and where logical form was a central analytical tool subsequently developed into specialist studies in the philosophy of language. An even more direct link with philosophy of language comes from Frege's work in semantics, which arose out of his more strictly logical studies, in particular his distinctions between sense and reference and between concept and object (Frege, 1952); his conception of thoughts or propositions has also been of seminal importance (a penetrating study of Frege's contribution to philosophy of language is in Dummett, 1973). For further discussion of the philosophical aspects of logical analysis, see Concepts; Entailment; Identity; Linguistic Philosophy; Logic: Historical Survey; Logical Form; Proposition; Singular!General Proposition. 1.3 Verificationism Other developments in analytical philosophy also became assimilated into the subject matter of philosophy of language. One of these was the veri2

ficationism connected with logical positivism in the 1930s and 1940s. The 'verification principle' was offered as a criterion of meaningfulness or cognitive significance: only propositions that were empirically testable or analytic were deemed meaningful, the rest (which included large tracts of metaphysics, theology, and ethics) being either purely of 'emotive' value or downright nonsense. Although the aims of the verification principle were basically epistemological (logical positivism was conceived as a linguistic version of classical empiricism), the principle itself clearly embodied a view about meaning. Versions of verificationism have survived the demise of logical positivism and have reappeared in verificationist (or 'antirealist') semantics. Roughly, the idea is to equate the meaning of a statement not with the conditions under which it would be true, but with the conditions under which it could justifiably be asserted. Michael Dummett is a principal exponent of this doctrine, but his concern is not so much to demarcate the meaningful from the meaningless as to relate meaning to learnability. Understanding, or knowledge, of a language, he argues, must be grounded .in linguistic practices, including the making of assertions and denials, without relying on a ('realist') conception of truth which might outrun human recognitional capacities. If this view is right, then philosophy of language must draw significantly on epistemology. Verificationist semantics also has implications for logic itself, involving a rejection of the classical law of excluded middle and the semantic principle of bivalence, which holds that every statement is either true or false. Intuitionistic logic grew up on this basis. See also Intuitionism; Deviant Logics; Realism; Verificationism. 1.4 Ordinary Language Philosophy Another offshoot of linguistic philosophy was 'ordinary language philosophy', which flourished for a relatively short period after World War II, principally in Oxford, and under the leadership of J. L. Austin. Again ordinary language philosophy was characterized both by its methodology—a close attention to the nuances and fine distinctions in ordinary usage—and its view of philosophy. But the emphasis that it gave to natural languages, rather than the artificial languages studied by formal logicians, and its rejection of the program of logical analysis (along with notions like 'logical form,' 'canonical notation,' 'regimentation') became a powerful influence in the development of speech act theory, as well as theories of communicative intention, speaker's meaning, implicatures, and so forth, which were at the heart of philosophically inspired pragmatics. Indeed the leading figure in both enterprises—ordinary language philosophy and speech act theory—was Austin himself. A distinctive approach to philosophy of language,

Philosophy of Language characterized by the work of Austin (1962), Strawson (1971), Searle (1969), and perhaps to a lesser degree Grice (1989) (see Sects. 2.2, 2.3 and 2.4 below) developed in Oxford alongside and largely under the influence of ordinary language philosophy. See Austin, J. L. and Ordinary Language Philosophy for more details. 1.5 The Importance of Wittgenstein It would be impossible to survey the origins of modern philosophy of language without mentioning Ludwig Wittgenstein. Yet, in spite of being arguably the most important philosopher of the twentieth century to write about language, his influence on leading theories in semantics and pragmatics is comparatively slight. His early work, which culminated in the fractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), was closely connected to the program of logical analysis associated with Russell and Frege. Like them he rejected psychologism in logic and sought to establish the fundamental conditions under which a signifying system could represent states of affairs. One of his principal concerns in that work—a concern common also to his later work—was how to draw the boundary between sense and nonsense. He advanced the thesis that is so-called atomic propositions, constituted by simple names whose meanings are logical atoms in the world, picture possible or actual states of affairs; all genuinely meaningful complex propositions, he argued, had to be truth-functions of these elementary propositions. Clearly the account is highly idealized and, from the point of view of ordinary applications, puts intolerably severe constraints on meaningfulness. In his later work, Wittgenstein turned his attention more to natural nonidealized languages and emphasized their 'multiplicity.' Disarmingly, in the Philosophical Investigations (1953), he insisted that it was not the job of philosophers to offer theories of any kind, and thus not theories of meaning, though his famous dictum 'the meaning of a word is its use in the language,' along with his other often highly complex observations about the foundations of language, have led commentators to try to reconstruct a theory of meaning from his writings (Kripke 1982; McGinn 1984; Travis 1989). Much attention has focused on his discussion of rule-following, particularly as it bears on arguments against the possibility of private language, and the postulation, in the later work, of 'languagegames' as determiners of sense. Also of importance is his rejection of the idea that general terms must be defined through necessary and sufficient conditions, a criticism embodied in the idea of'family resemblance.' Detailed examinations of Wittgenstein's views on language can be found in different articles, notably Wittgenstein, Ludwig; Picture Theory of Meaning; Language Game; Family Resemblance; Private Language; Rules. 2. Meaning If Wittgenstein's ideas have not fed directly into contemporary semantics, it might be partly due to his antipathy to theory and his disinclination to generalize from his observations about language. No such disinclination has constrained other theorists of meaning. Broadly speaking, it is possible to discern two kinds of approaches taken by philosophers to the analysis of meaning: one takes truth to be fundamental, including the conditions under which a sentence is true or false, the other takes intention to be fundamental, giving priority to the role of communication. The issue of controversy lies not in the choice between truth-conditions or communicativeintentions in an account of meaning, for it is far from clear that they are in opposition; rather it is the claim that one is more fundamental than the other. A compromise suggestion (though not one that would be universally accepted) might be that the emphasis on truth highlights the semantic aspects of language, viewed as those aspects concerned with the representation of (states of) the world; while the emphasis on intention highlights pragmatic aspects, viewed as those concerned with communicative exchanges in context. The question of the priority, or basicness, of one with regard to the other was raised in P. F. Strawson's inaugural lecture at Oxford 'Meaning and Truth' (in Strawson 1971); Strawson argued that the notion of truth-conditions cannot be explained without reference to the function of communication, so the latter is more fundamental. (For an analytic account of different theories of meaning in the philosophical tradition see Meaning: Philosophical Theories.) It is instructive to compare these approaches with those of a different cultural tradition, cf. Indian Theories of Meaning and a different intellectual tradition, cf. Deconstruction. 2.1 Meaning and Truth-conditions Truth-conditional theories of meaning draw partly on the intuition that the meaningfulness of language resides in its ability to represent how things are in the world and partly on advances in logic in describing the semantics of formal or artificial languages. From the latter came the thought that an ideal semantic theory is one that specifies the meaning (i.e., truthconditions) of every sentence of a language as a theorem derived from a formal axiomatized theory, where the axioms of the theory assign semantic properties to the component expressions of those sentences. Donald Davidson (1984) pioneered this approach in application to the semantics of natural languages, explicitly drawing on the formal work of Tarski (1956). Rejecting the format sentence s means that £ for the theorems of the semantic theory, Davidson argues instead for the Tarskian formula sentence s is true if and only if p. However, it would be wrong
3

Introduction to suppose that Davidson simply defines meaning as truth-conditions and leaves it at that. The interest of his account lies in the way he applies the insights of the idealized semantics (of artificial languages) to actual languages. Sentences of actual languages, unlike those of artificial languages, already have applications to objects and states of affairs in the world and this imposes an empirical constraint on the acceptability of the theorems of the semantic theory. To develop this idea Davidson follows Quine (1960) in postulating a fictional situation of an interpreter attempting to translate a native language totally unknown to him, spoken by people about whom he knows nothing. This is the situation of 'radical interpretation.' The radical interpreter's task is to assign truth-conditions to native sentences without presupposing an understanding of them. This can only be done by observing the linguistic and other behavior of the native people and attempting to correlate sentences (utterances) with salient features of the occasions of their utterance. The overall aim is to be in a position to issue reliable formulas of the kind sentence s. is true if and only if ]}. Of course several assumptions are required for this: one is that speakers intend to speak the truth and believe that what they say is true, another is that their sentences actually are true, for the most part. The former is a general assumption of rationality, the latter a 'principle of charity,' as Davidson describes it. These assumptions play a profound role in Davidson's epistemology and philosophy of mind and have been widely debated (e.g., Grandy 1973; Evans and McDowell 1976). For Davidson, attributing beliefs to speakers and meanings to the sentences they utter are closely interconnected. Although he holds that sentence meaning cannot be reduced to nonsemantic concepts (like belief or intention) he does suggest that the constraints on radical interpretation provide the best available philosophical elucidation of meaning. One of Davidson's initial principles in developing a theory of meaning is the innocuous sounding dictum that 'the meanings of sentences depend upon the meanings of words.' The principle is important for a number of reasons. If a language is to be learnable, the stock of words in the language—its vocabulary— must be finite; thus there can only be a finite number of axioms specifying the meanings of these basic components. Also, the principle articulates what many have seen as a fundamental premise in semantics, the compositionality of meaning, which has been more precisely formulated as follows: 'The meaning of a compound expression is a function of the meanings of its parts and of the syntactic rules by which they are combined' (see Compositionality of Meaning). The compositionality principle lies at the foundation of attempts to provide a formal semantics (see Formal Semantics) for natural language and is especially prominent in the work of Richard Montague (see Montague Grammar). However, it is by no means unproblematic; semantic primitives have to be identified and classified, they have to be assigned meanings, which must not be dependent on the meanings of whole sentences, combinatorial rules have to be defined, and so on. The idealized artificial languages of logic hold out a tempting model for how this might be achieved, and how it might look, but in application even to fragments of natural language the difficulties are formidable. One issue that has been much debated in the context of Davidson's semantic theory concerns the implications for what a competent speaker knows in knowing a language. In principle such a speaker knows the meaning of any given sentence from a potentially infinite set which can be generated by the language. As we have seen, Davidson takes it as a constraint on the learnability of a language that a 'theory of meaning,' in his sense, be finitely axiomatized, though that has been challenged by Schiffer (1987). The question remains as to the explanatory value of a semantic theory of which competent speakers have no conscious knowledge (the same problem arises for syntactic theories (Chomsky 1986)). One suggestion is that the knowledge is tacit (Evans 1985), another that semantic theories are rational reconstructions (Wright 1986). 2.2 Meaning and Communicative Intention The question of what speakers know who know a language invites a deeper inquiry into the very basis of linguistic meaning. While formal semantic theories—at least those of a broadly compositional nature—attempt to assign meanings to sentences on the basis of the meanings of their component parts, a rather different philosophical enterprise is to try to explain what kind of fact it is, about people's behavior, mental states, the life of a community, etc., that makes it true that a word or expression or sentence has the meaning it does, or indeed has any meaning at all. It is questions of this kind that concerned Wittgenstein and also Quine, the latter developing an essentially skeptical view, on a behavioristic base, to the effect that what facts there are radically underdetermine hypotheses about meaning (see Indeterminacy of Translation). Perhaps the most systematic attempt to explain meaning in nonsemantic terms comes from the program of H. P. Grice (1957, 1968, 1969; and others collected in 1989), developed by Schilfer (1972), Bennett (1973, 1976), Strawson (1964), and Searle (1969, 1983). Grice began by distinguishing 'nonnatural meaning' from 'natural meaning,' the latter, which he identifies only to set aside, being of the kind Those clouds mean rain. Linguistic meaning, Grice argues, belongs in the genus of nonnatural meaning which includes a wide range of communicative behavior. The bedrock for Grice's account of non-

4

Philosophy of Language natural meaning is an analysis of the conditions which 2.3 Speech Acts make it true that a person means something by an Speech act theory originated with J. L. Austin's analyutterance (where 'utterance' covers signs, gestures, sis of performative utterances—such as / promise to marks, or spoken sounds). What is involved, accord- pay, I pronounce you man and wife—the assessment of ing to Grice, is a complex intention, directed toward which, he proposed, should be determined not by an audience, that the utterance bring about a certain truth-conditions but by felicity-conditions (approresponse in the audience by means of the recognition priateness, sincerity, background context, intention, of that intention. A great deal of subtle revision and etc.). Austin (1962) came to see, though, that even qualification has ensued, mostly about the nature of statements, the paradigm truth bearers, could be the intended response (usually explained in terms of assessed in terms other than just their truth: in parbelief) and the need for further audience-directed ticular as actions of a certain kind. He introduced a intentions, but the basic analysis remains. Grice's pro- threefold distinction among speech acts: locutionary ject is to move from an analysis of Someone meant acts (acts of saying something, with a sense and refsomething by uttering X to X meant something to X erence), illocutionary acts (such as stating, promising, means (in a language) that p_. The idea, in short, is warning, performed in saying something), and perto ground semantics in psychological states such as locutionary acts (such as persuading, convincing, intention (and belief). annoying, amusing, performed by saying something). The program faces considerable difficulties. How Austin's early death meant that he was not able to can the full complexities of linguistic meaning be refine the theory in detail, though he did offer a rudiexplained on so slender a basis? One obvious problem mentary taxonomy of illocutionary acts. The theory concerns the role of convention. Standardly, so it was, however, developed by, among others, Searle would seem, the recognition of a speaker's meaning- (1969, 1979), Strawson (1964), who attempted intention is at least partly based on recognition of the to assimilate speech acts into Grice's analysis of conventional meaning of the sentence uttered by the speaker's meaning, and Holdcroft (1978). speaker. But that threatens circularity in the Gricean The relation between meaning and speech acts account. However, David Lewis (1969) has presented (especially illocutionary acts) has never been clear or an analysis of convention which, at least by not pre- uncontroversial. At the extreme, some (e.g., Cohen supposing linguistic meaning, offers an important sup- 1964) have dismissed 'illocutionary force' altogether, plement to the intentionalist analysis. Lewis explains incorporating the idea of'force' into a wider theory of convention in terms of a regularity of behavior in a semantic content. Others, following an initial insight group to which members of the group conform so as from Frege about assertion, have wanted a clear to bring about a coordination equilibrium, based on demarcation between the force of an utterance and its the common knowledge that everyone prefers to con- content or thought expressed. Yet others, like Searle form on condition that the others do. Much ingenuity (1969), propose to explain meaning, and ultimately has been exercised (Lewis 1969; Bennett 1976; Black- language itself, in terms of speech acts. Searle introburn 1984) in trying to apply this kind of convention duces the 'prepositional acts' of referring and predito linguistic meaning, for example by postulating cating, thereby extending the theory into the heart of conventional correlations between utterances or traditionally conceived semantics. He sees as a funutterance-types and specific beliefs and intentions. damental task for the philosopher of language the However, persistent objections center on the difficulty elucidation of constitutive rules governing the full for this view in accounting for the compositionality range of speech acts. of semantics and the fact that natural languages can The encyclopedia contains extensive coverage of all generate an infinity of unuttered sentences. An early aspects of speech act theory (in Section VIII); see exponent of Grice's theory believes (Schiffer 1987) Speech Act Theory: Overview; Speech Act Classithat the whole program is doomed to failure, though fication; Speech Act Hierarchy; Speech Acts and Gramthat can hardly be claimed as the last word on the mar; Speech Acts: Literal and Non-Literal; Felicity matter. For more details, see Grice, H. P.; Convention; Conditions; Indirect Speech Acts; Performative Meaning: Philosophical Theories. Clauses. Pursuing the enquiry into conditions of communication, philosophers of language came to exam- 2.4 Implicatures ine those aspects of meaning which go beyond A general problem for any philosophical theory of semantic content encoded in sentences. This has issued meaning is how to account for those instances of comin two important developments: speech act theory and munication where more than, or something different the theory of implicature, both of which are com- from, the information semantically encoded in a senmonly located within the pragmatics of language. (For tence is conveyed. Irony, figuration, and hyperbole a comprehensive general survey of the scope of prag- are familiar examples and meaning shifts associated matics, from the point of view of linguistics as well as with intonational contour, stress pattern, and so forth, philosophy, see Pragmatics.) are well charted. But it was not until Grice's theory of
5

Introduction
conversational implicatures, developed in his William James Lectures of 1967, that any systematic attempt was made to identify principles underlying the whole class of phenomena of this supposedly nonsemantic kind. Grice (1989) proposes a distinction between (a) what is said in an utterance, as determined by the semantic properties of the words uttered, (b) what is conventionally implicated, those implications which although not strictly semantic can nevertheless be drawn from the conventional meanings of the words, and (c) what is conversationally implicated, those implications which arise not from conventional meaning but from certain general features of discourse. Imagine the following exchange, drawn from Grice's discussion: A. I am out of petrol. B. There is a garage round the corner. case of the logical particles, to sustain a relatively uncomplicated truth-conditional semantics. Needless to say, these proposals remain highly controversial and face serious difficulties in their implementation. For an indication of some of the difficulties and further applications, see Davis (1991). Philosophers of language have explored other linguistic phenomena whose location within the pragmatics/semantics axis is problematic. One such is metaphor (see Metaphor), which has been the subject of more or less every standard approach, from truthconditional semantics to speech acts to pragmatic implicatures (Ortony 1979). Another is fictionality. which can be viewed either as a kind of utterance, subject to speech act conditions (Searle 1979), or as a degenerate case of reference (Donnellan 1974), or indeed in other ways besides. For more detail on Grice's theory of implicature, see Grice, H. P.; Conversational Maxims; Cooperative Principle. On presupposition theory, see Presupposition and Presupposition, Pragmatic. Also Metaphor; Fiction, Logic of.

According to Grice, there is a conversational implicature in B's reply that B thinks the garage has petrol, is open, etc., even though that is not strictly part of what B said, nor a consequence of the meanings of the words. Grice suggests that such implicatures arise 3. Reference from a tacitly accepted 'cooperative principle' gov- The final major area of concern within philosophy of erning conversation, in conjunction with con- language is reference in its many forms. One issue versational maxims of the kind be as informative as is which reflects, though is not entirely coincident with, required, say only what you take to be true, be relevant, the debate between semantics and pragmatics is be perspicuous. Conversational implicatures charac- whether reference is best understood as a relation teristically arise where these maxims appear to have between symbols and objects or between speakers, been flouted but have not in fact been flouted; on the objects, and hearers. According to the latter view, it basis of that assumption a hearer is forced to construe is speakers who refer to things, while in the former it the utterance (what the speaker intended) such that it is expressions in a language which refer (or denote). conforms to the cooperative principle. Two prominent applications for the idea of con- 3.1 Definite Descriptions versational implicatures have been to the meaning This issue is most famously associated in philosophy of logical connectives and to presuppositions. Grice of language with the debate over Russell's Theory of (1989) seeks to explain the apparent divergences Definite Descriptions. According to Russell, definite between the truth-functional definitions of the logical descriptions of the kind the father of Charles II or the particles (&, v , z>, ~) and the meanings of and, or, fastest man on earth should not be treated logically as if ... then, and not by appeal to implicatures. His naming expressions but rather as 'incomplete general strategy is to relocate the distinctive features symbols,' which acquire meaning only in the context of the natural language particles from semantic con- of a proposition and can be contextually paraphrased tent to pragmatic conditions of context-based speech. such that in a fully analyzed sentence they give way Thus, for example, the temporal connotation of and to quantifiers and predicates. Thus the sentence The (with the implication and then) is not, he argues, part father of Charles II was executed analyzes into There of the semantics of am/but arises from the orderliness is one and only one person who begot Charles II and that of discourse. The second application, to pre- person was executed. Russell's account was praised as supposition theory, is associated with a more general a 'paradigm of logical analysis' and indeed it neatly program to define presuppositions independently of solved several problems for the formal representation truth-conditions. A standard account of pre- of referring expressions, not least by snowing how supposition is that if p presupposes q then q is a necess- meaningfulness could be retained for sentences conary condition for the truth-or-falsity of p and the taining definite descriptions which failed to refer (the negation of p also presupposes q. A radical proposal present King of France, and so on). However, it came is to supplant this conception and explain the phenom- under attack, notably by P. F. Strawson (see essays in ena to which it is standardly applied with the twin Strawson 1971), for treating reference as a property notions of logical entailment and conversational of expressions rather than as something that speakers implicature (see Kempson 1975). This serves, as in the perform in an utterance characteristically for the pur-

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Philosophy of Language pose of identifying an object. For Strawson, when a definite description fails to apply to anything a basic presupposition for successful communication has failed and no truth-value can be assigned to the resulting assertion (Russell had given the value false to sentences with failed references). Strawson's analysis was contributory to the enormous subsequent interest in presupposition. Donnellan (1966), pursuing the idea of reference as grounded in contexts of utterance, argued that there are at least two fundamental uses of definite descriptions which he called referential and attributive, the latter being somewhat akin to Strawson's conception, but the former, controversially, giving definite descriptions a role more like that of proper names. (For an account of this highly influential theory, and its ramifications, see Names and Descriptions; Russell, Bertrand; Identity.) 3.2 Proper Names Russell and Wittgenstein (in his early work) developed the idea of a 'genuine' or 'logically' proper name the sole function of which is to denote a single and simple object, such that the object itself constitutes the meaning of the name (if there were no such object the name would be meaningless). Both were constrained by the search for an ideal logical language. In contrast, Frege argued that even in an ideal language denotation by means of a proper name must be mediated by something he called Sinn (sense). Philosophers of language have long debated the merits of these opposing views, and versions of them have proliferated. Even Russell admitted that his conception of a logically proper name did not fit ordinary proper names in natural languages (Socrates, London, etc.), which he took to be 'truncated descriptions' analyzable according to the Theory of Descriptions. However, Saul Kripke (1972) and others have attempted to revive something like the pure denotation view applied to ordinary proper names, rejecting both Fregean Sinn and Russell's 'descriptivism.' This has led to so-called 'causal theories' of names, where what determines the reference of a name is not the 'mode of presentation' embodied in the name's sense or whatever object satisfies an implied description but rather a direct causal link back to the object initially 'baptized' with the name (see Devitt and Sterelny 1987). In Kripke's terminology names are 'rigid designators,' in the sense that they designate the same object in all possible worlds where the object exists. Definite descriptions do not designate rigidly because in different possible worlds different objects will satisfy the descriptions. Versions of causal theories are probably in the ascendancy, though increasingly sophisticated accounts attempt to reassimilate something like Fregean sense (see Moore, 1993). Searle (1983) presents a powerful case against causal theories, locating reference in the philosophy of mind and arguing for the central place of intentionality in an account of language (see Intentionality). 3.3 Indexicals One particularly perplexing class of referential devices are indexical expressions (e.g., /, here, now, this, etc.) whose reference or extension is determined by context of utterance. The reference of T changes from person to person, It is late now changes truth-value when uttered at different times, and so forth. Once again it was Frege who set up the modern debate by proposing that sentences containing indexicals do not express a 'complete thought' until supplemented by indications of time, place, and other contextual determinants; while sentences contain indexical terms, thoughts (i.e., propositions) do not, for thoughts, if true, are timelessly true. Other philosophers have attempted by different strategies to eliminate indexicals. Perhaps the most systematic and widely regarded modern treatment is by David Kaplan (1989). An important distinction drawn by Kaplan, which has applications and consequences elsewhere in philosophy of language, is between two aspects of sense: 'content' and 'character.' The character of an expression such as T is most naturally associated with its 'meaning,' conceived as a rule which roughly identifies the use of T to refer to the speaker. Its content is given only relative to a context of use and is associated with what is said in that context: for Kaplan, when two people use the sentence / am tired in different contexts not only will the truth-value be affected but the content will differ also. Kaplan's conception of indexicals as 'directly referential,' not mediated by Fregean sense, places him broadly in the same camp as the 'causal theorists' of reference. The article Indexicals explores philosophical approaches (notably Kaplan's), while Deixis presents the issues from the perspective of theoretical linguistics. 3.4 Natural Kind Terms There is one further area where the distinction between sense and reference has come under pressure and where debate closely parallels that between descriptivists and causal theorists: this concerns the meaning of certain kinds of general terms, such as lemon, tiger, gold, water, which, reviving scholastic vocabulary, are said to stand for 'natural kinds'. On one view, stemming from Locke, the meaning of such terms is given by specifying salient properties of the natural kinds in question: 'a yellow citrus fruit with a bitter taste...,' and so on. This meaning will then determine the reference (extension) of the term, in the sense that the term will have in its extension, by definition, all those things which satisfy the description. However, the very foundations of this view have come under attack, principally by Hilary Putnam and Kripke. Putnam (1975) argues that natural kind terms should be treated as rigid designators whose extension is determined not by clusters of descriptions but by the very structure of nature, as investigated by science. The initial application of a term—parallelling the
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Introduction initial 'baptism' of an object by a proper name, on Kripke's account—is done by 'ostension' (or deixis): names are attached to stereotypical samples which are pointed at or have their reference fixed by a small set of experiential properties. But the observed properties of the stereotype are not incorporated into the meaning of the term, indeed it might turn out that the natural kind has none of the properties essentially that are experienced in the stereotype (science might reveal that it is not essential to being a lemon that it is either yellow or bitter). In this way Putnam's theory is realist (see Realism) and antiverificationist, in that the existence of natural kinds is independent of the experiences on which humans base their claims about them. Although Putnam has significantly modified his realist theory, his work has been enormously influential in philosophy of language, especially among those who pursue naturalized accounts of meaning and who seek to extend the underlying insights of causal theories of reference (e.g., Devitt and Sterelny, 1987). For a detailed account of naturalized semantics and causal theories of natural kind terms, see Reference, Philosophical Issues. 3.5 Truth The concept of truth underlies nearly all investigations in philosophy of language, certainly those concerned with both meaning and reference. Section 2.1 showed how meaning is sometimes elucidated through appeal to truth-conditions. Within Fregean semantics truthvalues stand to sentences rather as objects stand to names; just as the sense of a name determines its reference so the thought a sentence expresses determines its truth-value. But when the focus turns on truth itself, philosophers of language have a number of principal interests: the first is to account for the meaning of the truth predicate 'is true,' another is to identify appropriate truth-bearers, and a third addresses the paradoxes associated with truth. One longstanding debate about the meaning of 'is true' centers on whether the predicate is logically redundant: an influential view is that the statement that snow is white is true is identical to the statement that snow is white. Various 'minimalist' theories of truth— theories that reject as unnecessary such substantive elucidations as given in traditional 'correspondence' or 'coherence' accounts—have been at the forefront of debate in the 1990s (Horwich 1990) though they are by no means unchallenged (Blackburn 1984). The debate is outlined in Truth. What are the appropriate subjects of the truthpredicate? Many candidates have been offered, and not only linguistic ones: beliefs, thoughts, and judgments have all been designated truth-bearers. So also have sentences, statements, and propositions. Most sentences—for example, all those containing indexical expressions—can be assigned truth-values only relative to contexts. Statements are contenders for truth8

assessment precisely when viewed as contextualized uses of sentences, though an ambiguity in the term statement makes it unclear whether an act of stating can be true or false or only what is stated (the content) (Strawson 1971). Finally, the most traditional truthbearer is thought to be a proposition, considered as an abstract, even timeless, entity expressed by sentences and corresponding roughly to the meaning of a sentence in context. A great deal of controversy surrounds the idea of a proposition and different conceptions have been developed with more or less commitment to abstract entities (see the discussion in Proposition; also Singular/General Proposition). Semantic paradoxes (see Paradoxes, Semantic) have long been associated with truth, the oldest being the liar paradox which, in its standard version, asks for the truth-value of This sentence is false: seemingly, if the sentence is true, then it must be false, if false, then it must be true. Within philosophy of language the problem has been addressed both in connection with formalized languages (Tarski 1956) but also within the semantics of natural language. (Different strategies are outlined in Paradoxes, Semantic and Truth and Paradox; see also Formal Semantics; Metalanguage versus Object Language; Deviant Logics.) 4. Conclusion This article has addressed only a selection of topics within the philosophy of language centered on the key areas of meaning and reference, broadly conceived, along with certain issues on the relationship between semantics and pragmatics. Each of the topics has its own subtle ramifications and developments, and there are many more topics besides which philosophers would want to classify within this important branch of the subject; see, for example, Analyticity; Concepts; Emotive Meaning; Identity; Innate Ideas; Intensionality; Natural Deduction; Ontological Commitment; Private Language; Vagueness. While it is common to think of philosophy as dealing with conceptual or a priori questions, in contrast to linguistics conceived as an empirical inquiry, in fact that distinction between the disciplines is by no means clearcut. For one thing, philosophers are increasingly sensitive to work in related empirical fields and draw on it substantially (philosophers, of course, like other students of language, also draw on their own linguistic intuitions), but within theoretical linguistics work is sustained at no less a conceptual level than found in philosophy. There is no doubt that in some areas— formal semantics, the theory of implicature, quantification theory, indexicality, anaphora, and so forth— there is commonality of approach between philosophers and theoretical linguists. But in other areas—perhaps in the theory of reference or in approaches to truth or questions of intentionality and prepositional attitudes—philosophers do have a distinct contribution, at a foundational level, to an

The notion of the 'a priori' has its primary application in the field of epistemology, where it is standardly used to characterize a species of prepositional knowledge (knowledge that p, where p is a proposition) and, derivatively, a class of propositions or truths, namely, those that are knowable a priori (though strictly this way of classifying propositions should be relativized to a type of knowing subject, the usual presumption being that human subjects are in question). In a related usage, certain concepts are sometimes classified as a priori, namely, those that figure as substantive constituents of a priori truths. 1. A Priori Knowledge Knowledge is said to be a priori (literally: prior to experience) when it is knowledge which does not depend for its authority upon the evidence of experience. This is not the same as saying that it is knowledge which is acquired independently of experience, whether because it is innate knowledge or because it is knowledge learned without the substantive contribution of experience (for instance, knowledge learned through the exercise of pure reason). How knowledge is acquired and how knowledge claims are justified are quite distinct, albeit related, matters. The converse of a priori knowledge is 'a posteriori' knowledge. The history of the a priori/a posteriori distinction may ultimately be traced back to Aristotle, but modern usage owes much to the influence of Immanuel Kant. Until the twentieth century, the distinction was viewed with increasing skepticism by epistemologists, but interest in and respect for it have been revived. 2. A Priori and Innateness Although the notion of a priori knowledge and the notion of innate knowledge are quite distinct, historically philosophers have tended to run them together by confusing questions of justification with questions of acquisition. Mathematical knowledge is usually held up as the paradigm of a priori knowledge and certainly it is true that mathematical knowledge

claims, unlike the claims of physical science, do not normally depend for their justification or confirmation upon observational or experimental evidence (an exception being claims based on the results of electronic computation rather than on direct mathematical proof). Few would think it appropriate to test the truth of the arithmetical proposition 7 + 5=12 empirically, by repeatedly conjoining and counting sets of seven and five objects. (Unusually amongst major philosophers, however, John Stuart Mill did believe that mathematics rested ultimately upon induction from experience.) But even accepting the a priori status of mathematical knowledge, it is quite another matter to hold (as Plato did) that mathematical knowledge is innate (though this in turn is not to deny that experience may be needed to 'trigger' such latent knowledge, as happens in Plato's account of the slave boy in the Meno). Conversely, contemporary linguists like Noam Chomsky and philosophical psychologists like Jerry Fodor, who notoriously hold that much of our knowledge of language is innate, do not therefore wish to claim for (say) principles of universal grammar the same epistemological status as mathematical truths as far as their justification is concerned: linguistics, unlike mathematics, is an empirical science, answerable to observational evidence.
3. A Priori and Analyticity

'Empiricist' philosophers have traditionally held that all a priori knowledge is of necessary, analytic propositions, and conversely that all a posteriori knowledge is of contingent, synthetic propositions. David Hume, for instance, is standardly interpreted as adopting this view. Kant, however, famously held that we have some a priori knowledge of certain very general synthetic propositions (such as the proposition that every event has a cause), though he too believed that all a priori knowledge could only be of necessary truths. However, in his highly influential onslaught upon the 'dogmas of empiricism,' W. V. O. Quine was to argue that none of these distinctions could be
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Language, Metaphysics, and Ontology defined without implicit circularity of a sort which condemned them as useless for the purposes of a scientifically minded philosophy of language and knowledge. Only during the course of the twentieth century have philosophers been prepared once more to use these terms with confidence, thanks largely to the work of the modal logician and essentialist metaphysician Saul A. Kripke. Kripke points out that while the a priori/a posteriori distinction is an epistemological one, the analytic/synthetic distinction is a semantic one and the necessary/contingent distinction is, as he terms it, metaphysical in character. Accordingly he holds that in principle the three distinctions may cut quite across one another, and indeed Kripke has famously argued that there are both necessary a posteriori truths (such as that water is H2O) and contingent a priori truths (such as that the standard meter bar is one meter in length). See also: Analyticity; Necessity.
Bibliography Moser P K (ed.) 1987 A Priori Knowledge. Oxford University Press, Oxford Stich S P (ed.) 1975 Innate Ideas. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA

Abstract Ideas
E. J. Lowe

The doctrine of 'abstract ideas' is most closely associated, historically, with John Locke's theory of language, where they are invoked to explain the function of general terms. Locke's explanation is constrained by his commitment to nominalism, empiricism, and an ideational theory of thought and language. His nominalism and empiricism induce him to deny that general terms designate real extramental universals and to hold that an understanding of the meaning of general terms must somehow arise from experience of particulars, while his ideationism leads him to suppose that general terms must signify general ideas in the minds of those who use them. He postulates the process of abstraction as the mechanism whereby the mind generates the significata of general terms from its experience of particulars.
1. The Process of Abstraction

2. Criticisms of Abstraction

The process of abstraction supposedly consists in comparing various particulars which are encountered in experience, noting their similarities and differences, ignoring the latter and retaining the former in mind as a sort of pattern or template which can be employed in classifying further particulars that are met. These mental patterns or templates are the abstract general ideas. Locke illustrates the process by an example of how a child supposedly acquires the abstract general idea of a human being from its diverse experiences of the various individual people it encounters—its mother, father, and so on.
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Locke's doctrine has been subjected to severe criticism, notably at the hands of his contemporary George Berkeley, and until the late twentieth century many philosophers considered it unworthy of serious consideration. First, there is the problem of indeterminacy: if, for example, the abstract idea of a man leaves out differences of stature and coloration, one is left with the idea of a man who has no definite height or color, and this (Berkeley holds) is absurd. To this it may be replied that the abstract idea of a man is, rather, just an idea of a man which leaves the question of his height and color undetermined, and that this is perfectly intelligible if one does not (as Locke arguably did not) adopt an imagistic conception of ideas (as Berkeley himself did). Second, there is the problem of individuation: Locke's account of abstraction fails to accommodate the fact that particular objects of experience are only individuable as objects of some sort, and hence as falling already under some scheme of classification. But this does not show that humans do not have abstract general ideas, only that at least some of them would have to be innate (contrary to Locke's empiricist assumptions). Third, there are problems with the role that similarity or resemblance plays in the theory: for instance, it is said that similarity must always be similarity in some (general) respect, which threatens to reintroduce the reference to universals which Locke is attempting to eliminate; again, it is pointed out that in principle

Category-mistake anything is similar to and different from anything else in infinitely many ways, so that it is necessary to distinguish important or salient dimensions of similarity from others, and this once more indicates the operation of innate cognitive constraints in human thought and experience. Fourth, there is the problem of classification: Locke supposes that when a newly encountered particular is classified, it is done so by 'matching' it with an abstract general idea—but abstract ideas are themselves (mental) particulars, by Locke's own principles, so the question arises as to how a particular idea is classified as being, for example, an abstract general idea of a man. A vicious regress is clearly threatened. A possible answer is to say that the original process of classifying by matching does not require an active search through the stock of mental patterns or templates as one might search through a wallpaper pattern-book, and hence does not demand an ability to classify one's own ideas: rather, the process can be thought of as more or less automatic, perhaps by analogy with the way in which a confectionery machine dispenses a bar of chocolate upon receiving a coin of the right denomination.
3. Renewed Interest in Abstract Ideas

that none of the objections standardly raised against it is conclusive, help to explain its staying power, especially outside the realms of professional philosophy. Indeed, in the late twentieth century views recognizably akin to it (though often shorn of Locke's extreme nominalist and empiricist assumptions) have again become popular with many psychologists and philosophers interested in the mental aspects of language use, though now under the guise of talk about 'prototypes' (Eleanor Rosch) or 'stereotypes' (Hilary Putnam). An important difference, however, is that stereotypes are not, unlike Lockean abstract ideas, thought of as rigidly determining the extensions of the general terms with which they are associated. See also: Natural Kinds; Sortal Terms.

Within philosophy, the locus classicus for discussion of 'category-mistakes' is Gilbert Kyle's influential work The Concept of Mind (1949: ch. 1) where he argues that the traditional dualist (Cartesian) view of the mind as a separate substance, or 'ghost in the machine,' falsely 'represents the facts of mental life as if they belonged to one logical type or category... when they actually belong to another' (Ryle 1949:16). In at least his early writings in philosophy Ryle believed that philosophical problems themselves were characteristically 'category-problems' and that philosophical mistakes were more often than not grounded in confusions about logical categories.
1. Identifying Category-mistakes

Category-mistakes arise, according to Ryle, not only in philosophy but in quite ordinary contexts of thinking or speaking. He gives the example of a foreigner

being shown round Oxford or Cambridge who, having seen the colleges, libraries, playing fields, museums, scientific departments and administrative offices, then asks where the university is, 'as if "the university" stood for an extra member of the class of which these other units are members,' rather than being a term which describes 'the way in which all that he has already seen is organized.' Category-mistakes of this kind occur when speakers misunderstand concepts (in this case, the concept 'university'). But they can also arise where no such conceptual ignorance exists. Ryle illustrates this with the example of a student of politics who is aware of the differences between the British and, say, the American constitutions (the former not being embodied in any single document) but who becomes confused when trying to discuss the relations between the Church of England, the Home Office, and the British Constitution.
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Language, Metaphysics, and Ontology Because these names do not attach to entities of the same logical type no straightforward comparison can be made between the entities as different kinds of institutions. Confusion on this point can lead, so Ryle believed, to describing the British Constitution as 'a mysteriously occult institution,' just as the person who thinks of the Average Taxpayer as a fellow-citizen might suppose him to be 'an elusive insubstantial man, a ghost who is everywhere but nowhere.' On Ryle's view, it is precisely a mistake of the latter kind that Descartes, and subsequent Cartesian dualists, made in proposing that the mind is a non-material substance existing in parallel to material substance and defined for the most part negatively in contrast to it: not in space, not in motion, not accessible to public observation, etc.; 'minds are not bits of clockwork, they are just bits of notclockwork,' as Ryle mockingly puts it. On his own theory, Ryle develops the idea that terms applied to mental life ('knowing,' 'willing,' 'feeling,' 'imagining,' and so forth) do not describe mysterious inner occurrences or processes but rather dispositions in a physically observable person. Mental terms are thus restored to their proper logical category.
2. Categories and Category-differences
Two proposition-factors are of different categories or types, if there are sentence-frames which are such that when the expressions for those factors are imported as alternative complements to the same gap-signs, the resultant sentences are significant in the one case and absurd in the other. (Ryle 1938:203)

Whatever the merits of Ryle's concept of the mind, there is no doubt that his conception of a categorymistake enjoyed considerable influence among philosophers, particularly in the movement known as 'ordinary language philosophy.' However, the value and clarity of the conception depended in the end on the precision that could be attached to the idea of a category and it was probably on this point that Ryle's conception ultimately foundered. Everyone can recognize intuitively striking differences between kinds of entities—trees, Wednesdays, the number seven, a musical note, the Battle of Hastings. Such differences can readily be labeled 'category-differences.' Likewise, certain kinds of sentences seem to involve not just factual errors but something more fundamental which could be called 'category-mismatch': 'The number five is blue,' 'Wednesdays are in B minor,' "The Battle of Hastings fitted into his pocket,' and so forth. Theories of metaphor sometimes make use of such an idea of category-mismatch. However, when an attempt is made to state precisely what makes an entity belong to one category or another difficulties abound. Yet if no such account is forthcoming then more controversial applications—like the idea that minds and bodies belong in different categories—can only rest on vague intuitions. In an early and important paper on categories (Ryle 1938), Ryle did attempt to give some precision to the concept, though without following either Aristotle or Kant in supposing there is some fixed number of categories into which all human thought must fall. He offered the following definition:
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The problem with this criterion is that it relies on a unexplained notion of 'absurdity.' P. F. Strawson (1971) has shown that as it stands Ryle's criterion produces anomalous results: '[o]ne should try importing first "27" and then "37" as complements to the gap-sign in "She is over... and under 33 years old"; or first "mother" and then "father" into "It's not your... but your father"; or first "Green" and then "Red" into "... is a more restful color than red"' (Strawson 1971:187). Clearly only a special kind of absurdity—indeed a category-absurdity—is presupposed in Ryle's definition but one has not advanced very far if to explain category-differences one must appeal to category-absurdity. Another suggestion might be that category-absurdity is a species of analytic falsity, that is, falsity determined by meanings alone, but the sentence 'Some bachelors are married' while analytically false does not seem to involve any category-mismatch. Thus it remains to be said what kind of analytic falsity underlies categorymismatch.
3. Category-mistakes and Philosophical Method

Although Ryle gave prominence to the idea of a category-mistake in The Concept of Mind, even suggesting that '[p]hilosophy is the replacement of category-habits by category-disciplines' (Ryle 1949:8), he came to think that no precise definition can be given to the concept of a category, which consequently can never be used as a 'skeleton-key' which will 'turn all our locks for us' (Ryle 1954:9). Nevertheless, the idea that philosophy is centrally concerned with identifying the logical categories of its key terms—where necessary exposing categorymistakes—and undertaking what Ryle called 'logical geography' to find the proper location for problematic concepts was a powerful driving-force in conceptual analysis and produced some of the most valuable work of the 'ordinary language philosophers.' See also: Ordinary Language Philosophy.
Bibliography
Ryle G 1938 Categories. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 38: 189-206 Ryle G 1949 The Concept of Mind. Hutchinson, London Ryle G 1954 Dilemmas. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Sommers F 1963 Types and Ontology. Philosophical Review 72: 327-63 Strawson P F 1971 Categories. In: Wood O P, Pitcher G (eds.) Ryle. Macmillan, London

Deconstruction

Deconstruction
E. Crasnow

Deconstruction is the name of a kind of writing and a kind of thinking that symptomatically resists formulation. It is associated with the work of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida; but Derrida's own explosively various publications from the late 1960s onwards was accompanied by a dissemination of deconstruction, notably but not exclusively in the USA, where it was initially pursued by lettrists rather than philosophers, and played a key role in the rise of interest in literary theory, prompting continued debate in the humanities. Rather than attempting to cover all this activity, the present article will concentrate on Derrida's own work; but even this concentration does not offer a single identity. In terms of nationality, for instance, Derrida has pointed out the sense in which he is 'not French': 'I come from Algeria. I have therefore still another relation to the French tongue.' The sense of'another relation,' of otherness, is pervasive. Deconstruction is not an autonomous discourse; it exists in relation to other texts, in a reading of what Derrida calls 'loving jealousy' which displays the alterity in the texts' identity, the indigestible element in their system. This in turn gives a certain textual specificity to deconstructive writing, which is all too easily lost in a general discussion. This article therefore includes an extended consideration of one recent text.
1. Philosophy and Literature

This is an instructive passage in several ways. It presents the ambition to transcend a (philosophical) discourse, to get outside or beyond it into a metalanguage. But here as elsewhere, the transcendent gesture is ultimately impossible. On another occasion Derrida asks skeptically:
Can one, strictly speaking, determine a nonphilosophical place, a place of exteriority or alterity from which one might still treat of philosophy? (Derrida 1982:xii)

The sense of otherness also affects the question of a single discipline. Derrida is a philosopher by training and occupation, but his books are often denounced as alien to their apparent discipline, and he can describe himself as other than a philosopher:
I ask questions of philosophy, and naturally this supposes a certain identification, a certain translation of myself into the body of a philosopher. But I don't feel that that's where I'm situated. (Derrida 1985:140)

The implied answer is no: one must differ from within. Deconstruction must use the very tools it seeks to question. Another instructive aspect of the interview is its offer of literature as an alternative to philosophy, to replace it. Philosophy and literature are now in opposition, and such binary pairs are a frequent object of deconstructive analysis. These pairings are commonly marked by the speaker's preference. Thus from a philosopher's point of view the opposition between philosophy and literature might appear as the opposition between rigor and frivolity, and the advocate of literature would attempt to reverse this valuation. Deconstruction, however, specifically avoids a symmetrical reversal. Derrida will therefore not substitute Literature with a capital L for Philosophy with a capital P. Neither of these capitalized monoliths attracts him. For it is precisely the monolith, the self-identical structure, that provokes deconstruction, which in turn displays the monolith as already fissured, discovering the otherness in its apparent sameness; as in the discovery that an apparently rigorous nonliterary discourse is already tainted by the figuration that it would seek to exclude. For example, Thomas Sprat's 1667 History of the Royal Society celebrates the scientific ambitions of the body which he helped to found, and rails against the unscientific 'beautiful deceipt' of 'fine speaking,' against 'specious Tropes and Figures.' The Society's members have resolved, he writes:
to reject all amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style; to return back to the primitive purity and shortness, when men deliver'd so many things almost in an equal number of words. They have exacted from all their members a close, naked, natural way of speaking... (Sprat 1667)

In a 1981 interview he speaks of 'my attempt to discover the non-place or non-lieu which would be the "other" of philosophy. This is the task of deconstruction.' The interviewer asks 'Can literary and poetic language provide this non-lieu or u-toposT and Derrida replies:
I think so: but when I speak of literature it is not with a capital L; it is rather an allusion to certain movements which have worked around the limits of our logical concepts, certain texts which make the limits of our language tremble, exposing them as divisible and questionable. (Derrida 1984:112)

The metaphoricity of this diatribe against metaphor, this impure argument for purity, needs no emphasis. The metaphors link to form an implicit sequence: 'to return back... primitive purity... natural.' The opposition between pure and impure, between nature and artifice, is bolstered by a myth of origin which privi15

Language, Metaphysics, and Ontology leges the first term of each of these pairs. Sprat also privileges 'a natural way of speaking' as against the 'swellings of style.' Here style appears as unnaturally evident; and, through the Latin stilus (a pointed instrument for use with a wax tablet), it recalls the artifice of inscription, a writing as opposed to a speech. 2. Speech and Writing To examine the implications of this ranking of'speech' over 'writing' has been a recurrent task for Derrida. He traces it in Saussure, in Levi-Strauss, in Rousseau, and in the locus classicus: Plato's Phaedrus. Socrates, in this dialogue, tells of the Egyptian god Thoth, who invented writing and offered it to the king with 'a paternal love,' but found his gift refused; the parent is not always the best judge of children. The figure of parenthood is developed as Socrates describes the fate of speeches when transferred to writing: tumbled about anywhere with no parent to protect them, and unable to reply for themselves. As opposed to these abandoned children, however, there is 'a son of the same family, but lawfully begotten... the intelligent word graven in the soul of the learner, which can defend itself, and knows when to speak and when to be silent.' This is 'the living word of knowledge... of which the written word is properly no more than an image.' Plato's idealism is evident; the written word, depreciated as it is, functions in the same way as the image of the bed in the Republic. Yet the intelligent word is 'graven,' inscribed, in the soul: the rejected image of writing somehow taints the site from which it is excluded. The written word, for Plato, suffers an absence; there is no parent to speak up for it; it lacks the principle of reason which, by contrast, is present to the lawful son, the intelligent word graven in the soul. The intelligent word and the soul are both principles of reason; that is, reason is here present to itself and confirms itself. This self-presence is for Derrida characteristic of western metaphysics, whose various systems are organized around self-present, selfconfirming centers which control and legitimate their surrounding structures. 3. Logocentrism Building on the Greek logos, which can mean both 'word' and 'rational principle,' Derrida calls this Western tradition 'logocentrism.' It is apparent in Western religions, most obviously in the Fourth Gospel, which appropriates the pagan logos for Christian divinity:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (John 1:1)

on the contrary, logocentrism can be entirely secular, as in Husserl's phenomenology, where the selfpresence of consciousness, purified by a process of bracketing or reduction, attains what he calls a 'realm of essential structures of transcendental subjectivity immediately transparent to the mind.' These logocentrisms go beyond the world of physical fact. In their organizing mastery, they transcend the physical: they are metaphysical. Deconstruction engages in a questioning of metaphysics, insofar as metaphysics provides a repertoire of logocentric master terms: foundation, origin, end, essence. And the counterclaim is: "There will be no unique name, even if it were the name of Being.' So deconstruction, in dealing with binary pairs, does not simply reverse the direction of dominance and privilege the underprivileged. This would be to exchange the rule of centrism for another, the principle of mastery remaining intact. It has been shown how Derrida's attempt to discover the 'other' of philosophy entailed not an opposing recourse to literature, but rather 'an allusion to certain movements which have worked around the limits of our logical concepts.' These disruptive movements are what forestall a symmetrical reversal, and naming them is doubly problematic. In the first place is the risk of producing yet another master term, another 'unique name.' Second, to name and codify the deconstructive operation is to make it available for appropriation and vulgarization, particularly at a time when theories are fashionably marketable. As Adorno wrote, 'No theory today escapes the marketplace. Each one is offered as a possibility among competing opinions; they are all put up for choice; all are swallowed.' Once packaged for consumption, deconstruction is easily domesticated, its disruptive potential dissipated. It is for this reason that Derrida denies that deconstruction is a method or even a critique. But appropriations of one sort or another are unavoidable. American deconstructors, in particular, have been driven to definitions, which include Paul de Man's equation of the deconstructive potential of language with literature itself—a privileged role not envisaged by Derrida. Again, as de Man says:
I have a tendency to put upon texts an inherent authority, which is stronger, I think than Derrida is willing to put upon them. I assume, as a working hypothesis (as a working hypothesis, because I know better than that), that the text knows in an absolute way what it's doing. (de Man 1986:118)

And, even earlier, the 'I am that I am' of Exodus 3:14 is an example of presence confirmed by reflexive selfdefinition. But the practice is not exclusively religious;
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In fact the hypothetical nature of de Man's assumption is not always evident in his more apodictic statements. But, flirtations with literariness aside, deconstruction's influence on literary theory and criticism has been marked, not least because of its attention to the preconditions of discourse; to what goes into (and what is kept out of) the constitution of an identity, be it a discipline, a genre, a system, an

Deconstruction institutional practice; and how identity may be opened up to alterity, to a 'contamination of genres.' J. Hillis Miller, another American deconstructor long resident at Yale, has listed some of the assumptions of traditional literary studies that deconstruction has challenged. They include accounting for a literary work by reference to the writer; arranging literary history in an organic development of definable periods; holding that a good work should have a definable, unified meaning; that language is primarily referential, and that figurative language is 'an adventitious flourish added to a literal base' (Miller 1991:335). The list is apposite; its final point about figurative language has already been demonstrated with reference to Sprat. But it is in some ways deceptive. What it claims as deconstructive is not exclusively so; reference to the writer in interpreting the work, for example, is not questioned by deconstruction alone. Moreover, a list inevitably omits the point that, in Derrida and in some of his followers, it is the very language of deconstruction, its presentation and terminology, that constitutes the primary challenge. Derrida's own style varies according to its occasion; but it is commonly obtrusive, often obscure, elliptical, wittily performative. Its challenge proves rebarbative for some readers; for others it shapes the exhilarating experience of deconstruction as a kind of writing. In part, it shares with the differing idioms of Lacan or Althusser the desire to resist facile assimilation. Yet presentation in itself is no defense; there will always be popularizations, of which this is one. And terminology, however resistant, is open to appropriation. None of Derrida's coinages, no matter how neologistic or bizarre, has escaped. They have multiplied as if to prevent the emergence of a unique name, and in response to the readings of particular texts. He calls them 'undecidables'; and they take the risk, already mentioned, of naming those 'movements which have worked around the limits of our logical concepts,' and which are to be set to work in the text at hand.
4. Difference

could only come about through the imposition of what Derrida calls a 'transcendental signified' to curb the play of semiotic slippage, which ultimately cannot be curbed and which produces the 'indeterminacy' of deconstruction. From this point of view, Saussure is not differential enough. But difference is not the only concern. The French verb differer indicates not only differing but also deferring or delaying; it can thus be read as displacing the moment of self-presence in logocentrism, 'spacing and temporalizing' as Derrida puts it. All these functions of difference and deferment are combined in the neologism 'difference': 'the movement that structures every dissociation... what in classical languages would be called the origin or production of differences.' And despite various disclaimers—'Difference is neither a word nor a concept'—it remains, as Derrida acknowledges, a metaphysical name. Indeed, it is a name for something that has been unnameable within the logocentrism of Western culture (though it appears 'almost by name' in the work of radical thinkers like Heidegger, Nietzsche, Freud). With this series of denials the discussion begins to sound very much like negative theology, but with a difference:
This unnameable is not an ineffable Being which no name could approach: God, for example... there never has been, never will be, a unique word, a master-name. (Derrida 1991:76)

One of the most wide-ranging of these undecidables is the famous 'difference.' The usual 'e' is replaced by an 'a,' and the replacement is inaudible—an effect of writing rather than speech. Differance retains some of the usual connotations of difference; deconstruction reads with difference insofar as it reads against sameness, the noncontradictory, the homogeneous. It builds on Saussure's claim that 'in language there are only differences without positive terms.' This is not to claim that Saussure is a deconstructionist avant la lettre. His preference for speech over writing is at times logocentric, as Derrida points out; and his positive view of the combination between signifier and signified is replaced in deconstruction by a regressive series of significations, each signified always in the position of another signifier, a process whose closure

For all that, within eight years of the French publication of'Difference' in 1968, it was possible for Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the translator of Of Grammatology, to describe it as 'close to becoming Derrida's master concept.' Whatever disclaimers are offered, the forces of appropriation will seek mastery, even negative mastery. One possible reaction is to seek safety in numbers by multiplying the undecidables. In Derrida's later work, however, there seems to be at least a partial despecialization of terminology, with an increasing concentration on topics like translation, or names and naming: topics which work without recourse to neologism. On the contrary, they signal a continuum with others' analyses, as in Derrida's repeated readings of Benjamin on translation.
5. Puncepts

A further aspect of deconstructive terminology or indeterminology is its use of wordplay and the compound pun. Gregory Ulmer has offered the term 'puncept' for this habit; a mutation that recalls the derivation of 'concept' from the Latin conceptus, a participle of the verb concipio, itself formed from com ('with, together') and capio ('to take hold of, to grasp'). That is to say, the term 'concept' has a centrist etymology; to replace it with the pun or puncept is a decentering move. Puns disrupt the propriety of language, but they need not be unmotivated, and Derridean wordplay is functional. For example, one
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Language, Metaphysics, and Ontology of his discussions of translation is called 'Des Tours de EabeV (1980). In this title, the biblical tower of Babel is pluralized into a symptom rather than an event. Des can be read as 'of the' or 'about the'—here, as in the later Of Spirit, there is an echo of the diction of an academic monograph; but we can also read Des as the casual 'some,' which undermines formal diction. One cannot tell from Des Tours whether tour is feminine, which would make it a tower; or masculine, which would make it a turn, a twist, a trope: varieties of indirection that the essay will apply to translation as such and to language in general. This indirection is emphasized by punning on Des Tours and detour; detour, like delay is an aspect of differance. Accordingly, the failed structure of Babel becomes a deconstruction:
The 'tower of Babel' does not figure merely the irreducible multiplicity of tongues; it exhibits an incompletion, the impossibility of finishing, of totalizing, of saturating, of completing something on the order of edification, architectural construction, system and architectonics. (Derrida 1991:244)

other /tore-compounds; for example, hors concours. A picture at an exhibition is hors concours if it is above its class, out of competition. Perhaps to be hors-texte is to be out-of-text in the sense that one is out of the game, out of play. But this is a negative sentence, so that the possibility of being out of play is precisely what it denies. These readings suggest the impossibility of an appeal to:
a signified outside of the text whose content... could have taken place outside of language, that is to say, in the sense that we give here to that word, outside of writing in general. (Derrida 1976:158)

'Improper' procedures like the pun are deliberately courted as a means of interrogating propriety, property, and the proper. In 1975 Derrida gave a lecture, later expanded into a book, on the poet Francis Ponge. The title seems innocuous; SignePonge, perhaps 'Signed Ponge,' as if inscribed below a Ponge text. Lurking within this sober compound, however, is a sign of the drunken eponge: a 'soak,' or an amorphous 'sponge.' Passer I 'eponge sur is to blot out or obliterate; thus / 'eponge eponge, I 'eponge est Ponge: 'the sponge expunges, the sponge is Ponge'... The sponge becomes a deconstructive operator with which to interrogate the notion of signature as the identifying mark of the proper name; and this is carried out in and through the outrageous wordplay and the readings of Ponge's texts.
6. Inside and Outside

An outside in this sense is strictly Utopian, the u-topos or non-lieu already described. A problematics of outside and inside develops in deconstruction; leading, for example, to the question of what is formally outside a text—preface, afterword, footnote, commentary—and the presumption of priority or authority that such elements may claim. This in turn produces a recurrent questioning of boundaries, margins, and frames, and in some cases the disruption of the printed page as a visual unit; Glas (1974) is printed in two columns which deal with Hegel and Genet, the proper and the improper; but which are multifariously interrupted, not only by other discourses but also by typographical intrusions, inset blocks of print which give the page the appearance of a collage.
7. Ethics and Politics

A milder but notorious piece of wordplay comes from Of Grammatology, one of three books published in 1967. During a discussion of Rousseau, Derrida turns, as he so often does, to the question of reading, and produces the sentence lln'y a pas de hors-texte. This saying raises crucial questions and has become a rallying cry against deconstruction. Rendered as 'there is nothing outside the text' it is used to accuse deconstruction of a narrowly text-based reading practice; or, more generally, of a nihilistic indifference to context and history. But there are other readings. A small slippage produces lln'y a pas dehors-texte: there is no outside of or to the text (recall the earlier question of whether there was a place outside philosophy). If the text (whatever that turns out to be) has no outside, it seems boundless; rather than narrowing the field, this opens it widely. Then again, hors-texte seems to echo
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The problem of inside and outside has further implications which lead into ethics and politics. They can be approached through the notion of context as an outside, and the indifference to context which has been read into lln'y a pas de hor-texte. This may imply an extension of textuality rather than an encapsulation of the text. Derrida refers to this extension as the 'general text,' as in these comments during a controversy that followed the publication of some of his antiapartheid writing:
That's why South Africa and apartheid are, like you and me, part of this general text, which is not to say that it can be read the way one reads a book. That's why the text is always a field of forces: differential, heterogeneous, open and so on. That's why deconstructive readings and writings are concerned not only with library books, with discourses, with conceptual and semantic contents... They are also effective or active (as one says) interventions, in particular political and institutional interventions that transform contexts.... (Critical Inquiry 13:167-68)

In this and in other passages there appears to be a convergence between general text and context, as an open field of forces which is subject to intervention, but which, through its very openness, cannot be determinately specified—as in the gesture of specifying a

Deconstruction context that will determine the meaning of a text. The context is never 'saturated.' Thus Derrida can include Freud's personal history in a discussion of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, but cannot claim any psychobiographical authority; his title is '"Specifier"—sur Freud' and he considers how even an autobiography might speculate. The larger question of a deconstructive politics has been widely debated. Barbara Johnson, one of the shrewdest American deconstructors, says:
There's no political program, but I think there's a political attitude, which is to examine authority in language, and the pronouncements of any self-constituted authority for what it is repressing or what it is not saying.

Johnson's attitude is antidogmatic; political dogma itself, as it asserts a party line, can become one of those monolithic structures which deconstruction views as always already fissured by otherness. And the positive, indeed affirmative role claimed by deconstruction has increasingly focused on its response to the other and to otherness, to the alterity that self-identity tries to exclude: 'every culture is haunted by its other.' Deconstruction can then claim to contribute to a necessary cultural self-interrogation whose range is potentially vast: Derrida, describing 'the violent relationship of the whole of the West to its other,' invokes ethnological, economic, political, and military relationships, besides the linguistic and philosophical relationships which form his usual approach (Derrida 1982:134-35). His work on denegation, marginalization, violent suppression, and exclusion during the 1980s concentrated on Nazism. There are several reasons for this concentration. No doubt it owes something to Derrida's own experiences as a Jewish child in colonial Algeria after the fall of France (Wood and Bernasconi 1985:113). More recently, violent debates followed the discovery that Paul de Man—a personal friend—had during World War II produced a body of journalism in occupied Belgium that included some collaborationist and anti-Semitic sentiments (Miller 1991:359-84). Most particularly, perhaps, it stemmed from the wish not to suppress awkward facts about philosophers whose work had been important to him. Thus it was necessary not to avoid the specific Nazi involvement of Martin Heidegger during the 1930s, and his silence about subsequent events. 8. Derrida on Heidegger Derrida was one of several writers (including LacoueLabarthe and Lyotard) to reopen Heidegger's case. His book Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question appeared in French in 1987; the title's strategy recalls l Des Tours de Babel'; and on this occasion, the reader is specifically reminded of how De I 'esprit invoked a tradition of the learned treatise; the overlap of French and Latin de lends it classical authority. But the title

also echoes 'a scandalous book' of the same name: Helvetius's De I 'esprit, proscribed and burned in 1759. This too is conveyed to the reader, in a mysteriously proleptic footnote which begins 'Since the whole of this discourse will be surrounded by fire...'; it goes on to describe the burning of other heretical books, and indeed the burning of a heretic. Already, with this apparent digression, Ciceronian learned solemnity is wearing thin; a different interest appears through the opposition of dogma and heresy, the deconstructive interest in exclusion and repression. The notion of system or structure as that which perpetuates the same at the expense of the other is acted out here through disruptions at various levels of the text. Thus, what seems to be on offer is a formal scheme, an analytic narrative about Heidegger's use of a certain set of terms between 1927 and 1953; but its methodical sequence is constantly interrupted by retrospect and anticipation: 'Twenty years later, Heidegger will have to suggest... .' And, as in the Helvetius footnote, a digressive tendency, a substitution for the apparent topic, is constantly suggested by initially obscure interventions:
I shall speak of ghost [revenant], of flame, and of ashes. And of what, for Heidegger, avoiding means.

These are the opening sentences; with hindsight, they are purposefully ambiguous. In one sense, their concerns are all present in the narrative; in another they are largely absent, excluded, 'avoided' in their historical aspect—which is nevertheless invoked through passages like the Helvetius footnote, which with its burning of books and bodies can hardly fail to recall Nazi incinerations. The rare direct references are powerfully understated: 'this was not just any quarter century.' Through such reticence the text mimes Heidegger's attempted avoidance of an historical referent in the postwar period; and, at another level, the Nazi attempt to efface the Final Solution. 8.1 Language and Nationalism Another way of putting this would be to describe the return of the repressed. What returns, in French, is a revenant, a ghost; and a ghost in German is der Geist; but Geist is also spirit—Geist and its compounds are what Of Spirit is 'about.' In its oscillation between concept and context the book works like a huge and tragic pun. This pun is also an oscillation between languages, and questions of translation recur throughout. And unlike the treatment of translation in 'Des Tours de Babel,' where it serves as what Derrida calls a 'conceptual generality,' translation in this text is particularized: 'What I am aiming at here is, obviously enough, anything but abstract.' One particular field of translation concerns philosophical nationality and nationalism; not only in the linguistic problems revealed by translating Geist into the languages of its European neighbors, but also in the massive ideo-

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Language, Metaphysics, and Ontology logical implications of this move: a translation, as Derrida puts it, of discourse into history. The extreme privilege that Heidegger grants to German, or German-and-Greek, is well known; 'horribly dangerous and wildly funny,' says Derrida. Heidegger's geopolitics forms a sort of selective Eurocentrism with the Greek pneuma, the Latin spiritus, and the German Geist inscribed in what Derrida calls a 'linguisticohistorical triad' of spirit. German is still privileged here because it depends on what Heidegger claims is an 'ordinary meaning.' The whole situation should by now be familiar: maintenance of the same by exclusion of the other, endorsement of the same by a myth of origin. Deconstructive analysis intervenes by showing the other as already inscribed within the same, and undermines the myth by showing the origin as already heterogeneous and hence not a pure identity. The stages are no longer spelt out as they were in previous works, but the strategy survives. In a piquant move, the triadic foreclosure of spirit is opened up to include the Hebrew ruah, with as good a claim to origin as any other term for spirit; it is 'what Greek and the Latin had to translate by pneuma and spiritus? Moreover, ruah is shown as linked with pneuma through the Gospels, and as containing both good and evil in the manner that Heidegger ascribes to Geist. What was avoided has been included, from the outset. 8.2 Heidegger's Deconstruction Geist is itself, to an extent, avoided by Heidegger. It never receives the interrogation afforded to terms like Dasein or Denken—this despite Geisfs importance in the nineteenth century, not only as an index of national culture, but also as a focus for philosophical enquiry, as in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. It is part of Heidegger's great work of 1927, Being and Time, to question this importance and this focus, insofar as Geist follows a Cartesian emphasis on subjectivity that for Heidegger marks a wrong turning in philosophy. As he recounts this questioning, Derrida is in fact describing a Heideggerian deconstruction, which will expose the apparent autonomy of cogito ergo sum as fissured by the ignoring or avoiding of sum; emphasis is all on the cogito, which leads to a subsequent 'neglect of being,' a failure to investigate existence, in the 'Cartesian-Hegelian' tradition. Being and Time attempts a reorientation: 'the "substance" of man is not spirit as a synthesis of the soul and the body but existence.' The suspect term 'spirit' is commonly placed between quotation marks in Being and Time—a typographical warning which, like Heidegger's crossings-out, has had its own influence on Derrida—who, after all, derives 'deconstruction' itself from Heidegger's Destruktion and Abbau. He could easily have used Destruktion for Heidegger's questioning at this point; instead, he uses his own word and invokes his own practice, as if to emphasize that
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deconstruction is no absolute safeguard against the snares of thought. For there is a drastic change to come. 8.3 Heidegger's Logocentrism The 'tortuous prudence' of Being and Time is abandoned in 1933, when Heidegger, as the newlyappointed rector of the University of Freiburg, gives an address on the self-assertion of the German universities. The prophylactic quotation marks are deleted as he offers a 'spiritual world' which 'guarantees the people its grandeur,' and which is not the people's culture or knowledge but 'the deepest power of conservation of its forces of earth and blood.' The exaltation of will, order, and destiny, the rejection of academic freedom, are unmistakably Fascist. 'One could say,' writes Derrida, 'that he spiritualizes National Socialism.' But in doing so Heidegger goes back on his own deconstruction, at least insofar as the 'massive voluntarism' of the address, its will to power, is a return to the subjectivity which he had been at pains to question. Of Spirit follows the fortunes of Heidegger's Geist through the various stages of its 'inflammation and inflation'—terms that turn out to be more than metaphorical. The book is described as surrounded by fire; its climax comes in Heidegger's comments on the poet Trakl, where the inflammation is actual. Here, 'Der Geist ist das Flammende' and lDer Geist ist Flamme1; spirit is a 'flame which inflames, or which inflames itself; it 'can devour tirelessly and consume everything up to and including the white of the ash.' As he has done before, Derrida shows how what had been excluded returns in Heidegger's discourse; and here he invokes Hegel whose determination of spirit had previously called for deconstruction. Now Derrida points the reader towards the treatment of Hegel in Glas; and, turning to that text, he quotes Hegel's description of spirit as luminous essence, in terms that sound very like Heidegger's spirit-in-flames:
Pure and figureless, this light burns all. It burns itself in the all-burning it is; leaves, of itself or anything, no trace, no mark, no sign of passage. (Derrida 1986:238)

Heidegger has rejoined Hegel and the logocentric tradition. The purity of this self-consuming, figureless figure recalls 'I am that I am' (and perhaps the burning bush) in its reflexive autonomy, free of difference, free of the other as residue. Again, Derrida does not spell out the deconstructive response to all this. Rather, he invokes the inevitable return of the other, the haunting revenant in its full range of implications from semantic difference to social difference. Some of this range is suggested in Glas when Hegel's pure light is described as a kind of offering or sacrifice, but Derrida imposes another term:
... the word holocaust that happens to translate Opfer is

—another total figure that leaves no trace. Glas uses its two-column layout to juxtapose this point with a scene in an Algerian synagogue. Of Spirit, as we know, is more reticent. The Holocaust is never named, but it is implicitly suggested and deconstructed, both as a conceptual and as an historical totality: the Solution that was not Final, the ash that was not consumed.
9. Conclusion

It should by now be apparent that the very appearance of deconstruction in the context of an encyclopedia is paradoxical. An encyclopedia surveys established knowledge in a necessarily dogmatic fashion, while deconstruction seeks precisely to question the dogmatic and the established. Yet, as already shown, it has to differ from within; and this not only justifies its placing in reference books but, in a larger sense, gives it its cultural role.
Bibliography Davis R C, Schleifer R (eds.) 1985 Rhetoric and Form Decon-

Essentialism
T. R. Baldwin

Several twentieth-century philosophers of language have argued that the semantic properties of language have important essentialist implications. Essentialism is, however, a vague doctrine, and before examining its modern manifestations it is helpful to look briefly at its historical origins.
1. Aristotelian Essentialism

There is a manifest difference between those properties which objects possess only at some times and those which they possess throughout their existence. If this distinction is extended to embrace possible changes as well as actual ones, one arrives at one conception of an object's 'essential' (as opposed to its accidental) properties, namely those properties which it cannot fail to possess. Aristotle held that in identifying that essential property of an object which identifies what kind of thing it is—its essence—the means is provided for an understanding of all the object's properties, since all explanations rest upon 'first principles' which concern these essences. This thesis was enormously

influential, and is the basis of traditional essentialism. Descartes shows its influence when he discusses the essences of mind (thought) and matter (extension), and constructs his psychology and physics upon these identifications. But the essentialist tradition became problematic as new sciences developed without reference to traditional essences. Locke shows well the resulting situation: he acknowledged the traditional doctrine in his theory of 'real essences,' but, doubting people's ability to know anything of them, he held that the classifications employed in the new sciences are only 'nominal essences,' that is, not really essential properties at all. In Kant's works essentialism returns, but now as a doctrine about the essential features of objective experience, and thus only indirectly as a doctrine about essential features of the world. Nonetheless, Kant's doctrines provided the stimulus for an idealist essentialism according to which all aspects of the world are essentially related. Since the analytic program in philosophy arose as a reaction against the
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Language, Metaphysics, and Ontology Kripke and others have argued that the initial thesis here is a logical consequence of the necessary reflexiveness of identity, and although this argument is not persuasive, the thesis itself seems integral to the concept of identity (though some theorists reject it—cf. David Lewis 1986). But whether this thesis has significant implications is much disputed. Critics argue that since possible situations can be specified by permutations of the properties of actual objects there is no need for the hypothesis of 'haeccities.' Further2. Modern Essentialism more, it is argued (Mellor 1977), essentialists misSince the development of possible world semantics represent natural necessity: the genetic dependence of for modal logic in the 1960s, however, essentialist children upon their parents should not be regarded as doctrines have become fashionable within analytic embodying a special 'metaphysical' necessity. Simiphilosophy. Quine's arguments against the very idea larly, natural kinds should not be represented as Ariof essentialism were decisively refuted by Kripke stotelian essences, since the existence of general(Kripke 1980), and some philosophers have sought to izations about a level of explanation revive Aristotelian doctrines (Putnam 1975). What is compatible with kind at one structures at a deeper a diversity of remains wide open to argument, however, is the extent level; thus water is a natural kind even though D O as 2 of a defensible essentialism. well as H2O is water. The only defensible essentialA modest position draws on familiar necessary truths (e.g., that 5 is less than 7) and argues that these ism in the natural sciences appears to be one which can be reinterpreted as identifying essential properties invokes only Locke's nominal essences. of the objects referred to (i.e., that it is an essential See also: Analyticity; Concepts; Natural Kinds; property of 5 that it is less than 7). Where this modest Necessity. essentialism concerns abstract objects, such as numbers, it suggests that these are just nodes within a network of internal relations. More ambitious essen- Bibliography tialist positions concern concrete objects and, drawing Kripke S A 1980 Naming and Necessity. Blackwell, Oxford on the thesis that an object's identity is essential to it, Lewis D 1986 On the Plurality of Worlds. Blackwell, Oxford (ed.) argue that its essential properties include its causal Linsky L Press, 1971 Reference and Modality. Oxford University Oxford origin, its material constitution, and its kind (the tra- Mellor D H 1977 Natural kinds. British Journal of the Philditional Aristotelian essence); it is even urged that osophy of Science 28:299-311 each object has a distinctive essential property (its Putnam H 1975 The meaning of 'meaning.' In: Putnam H haeccity) which sustains its identity through different Mind, Language and Reality. Cambridge University Press, possible situations. Cambridge excesses of this idealist essentialism, for the first half of the twentieth century there was little interest in essentialist doctrines (with the notable exception of Wittgenstein's Tractatus). Indeed W. V. O. Quine famously argued that essentialism is incoherent (Linsky 1971). Within the phenomenological movement, by contrast, essentialist doctrines flourished, though in the writings of Heidegger and his disciples the use of essentialist terminology is problematic.

Falsificationism
A. A. Brennan

Verificationist theories of meaning are concerned with cognitive significance. Their intention is to separate sentences into two distinct classes, namely those that have cognitive significance, or empirical meaning, on the one hand, and those that are meaningless on the other. However, in his Logic of Scientific Discovery Karl Popper argued that a criterion for demarcating the scientific from the nonscientific could be based not on how a claim, hypothesis, or theory is verified but rather on whether it is capable of falsification. Universal statements such as 'All ravens are black' are not completely verifiable, since it would require examination of an infinite number of cases to establish

their truth. However, one counter example alone is sufficient to establish the falsity of such a statement. If a clear (but nowadays controversial) distinction is made between theory and observation, then theories could be divided into those which are open to falsification (hence, for Popper, having empirical content) and those which are not. Theories which are vulnerable to empirical refutation and which withstand it are, he claimed, thereby confirmed to some degree. Science makes progress, he suggested, by scientists making conjectures and then looking to see if nature refutes them. Popper's work is based on a number of doubtful com-

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Foundations of Linguistics mitments. These include recognizing a clear theoryobservation distinction, maintaining a realistic conception of the objects of scientific study, and also holding that the sciences have a hypothetico-deductive structure in terms of which notions like confirmation and testability can be explicated. Under the impact of Thomas Kuhn's sociological approach to the sciences, and of serious qualms about the viability of realism in metaphysics, theory of meaning, and the sciences, many contemporary philosophers of science would be reluctant to endorse Popper's image of an objective science being driven forward by the method of conjecture and refutation. This is not to deny that scientists make conjectures and test them: but this is only part of a range of activities in which they engage and may play a relatively minor role in determining which portions of current theories are rejected and which retained. See also: Verificationism.
Bibliography Hacking I 1983 Representing and Intervening. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Kuhn T S 1970 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edn. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL Popper K R 1968 The Logic of Scientific Discovery, rev. edn. Hutchinson, London

Foundations for linguistics in the ontological sense are established through identifying and describing the ultimate constituents or aspects of reality which linguistic theories seek to refer to and to characterize. (Similar questions arise in relation to other disciplines. Are social facts really, ultimately, facts about individual human beings? This is a question about ontological foundations for the social sciences.) Theorists concerned with this issue have formulated distinct accounts of the ontological foundations of linguistics. According to 'psychologism,' linguistic theories are meant to characterize the psychological states of language users and, in particular, their competence to employ their language (see Chomsky 1986: ch. 1). According to Platonism, the objects which linguistic theories are meant to characterize (namely, sentences) are purely abstract in the same way as are the objects of mathematical theorizing—they have, in other words, no material existence or embodiment per se (though they might be 'represented' by given material objects or events) (see Katz 1981). According to 'behaviorism,' linguistic theories seek to characterize the actually occurring speech behavior of individual language users and to identify the stimulus circumstances and patterns of conditioning which give rise to it (see Skinner 1957). According to 'conventionalism,' linguistic theories aim at characterizing the socially constituted con-

ventions which regulate individuals' speech behavior (see, for instance, Bennett 1976). 'Instrumentalism' is a radical alternative to these more committed positions on ontological foundations, according to which it is unnecessary, when theorizing about linguistic phenomena, to provide any account of deeper realities which might be manifested in these phenomena; linguistic theories, on this account, need only provide a basis for the prediction of phenomena. (Instrumentalism, less fashionable in the early 1990s than previously, was perhaps most appealing in relation to quantum mechanics, where it is notoriously difficult to give, within the framework of classical physical theories and of commonsense concepts, a coherent interpretation of underlying realities.)
2. Epistemological Foundations

Foundations for linguistics in the epistemological sense are established when a category of claims is identified with respect to which all other claims are to be justified. (Foundationalism in this sense is no longer as reputable, in the general philosophical context, as it certainly once was. According to contemporary thinking, epistemic justification is provided not by establishing links between foundational claims and those which are to be justified, but, instead, by exhibiting the 'coherence' of the claims which are to be justified with other claims already, though only defeasibly, assumed to be justified.) According to some, it is native speakers' 'intuitions' about grammaticality, synonymity, etc., that are to be used to test linguistic hypotheses. (This position is
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Language, Metaphysics, and Ontology associated with the program initiated by Chomsky.) Others reject this approach on the grounds that such intuitions do not provide a suitably intersubjective basis for testing linguistic claims. (How are cases in which some speakers claim grammaticality and other speakers deny it to be understood? For critical discussion of this approach, see Sampson 1975: ch. 4.) Alternatives (or supplements) to such intuitionism include psycholinguistic investigation of speech production and comprehension, and corpus-based investigation of distributional structure. Those who seek psycholinguistic foundations demand, for the justification of some claim, that it be supported by evidence about the psychological states of language users. That the sentences Alf persuaded Beth to leave and Alf expected Beth to leave have different 'deep structural' analyses has its epistemic grounding, on this account, in facts, revealed in 'click paradigm' experiments, about language users' perceptual images of these sentences (Fodor et al. 1974: ch. 6). Corpus-based investigations, by contrast, take as epistemically primitive observations of the distribution, in an attested corpus of utterances, of various subsentential elements (for an influential account, see Harris 1964).
3. Relations Between Ontological and Epistemological Foundations

Another approach to linguistic foundations is embodied in attempts to articulate the findings of linguistics with those of other sciences. Those involved in the neurolinguistic enterprise are plausibly represented as seeking to discover the bases or foundations, in the architecture and functioning of the brain, of human linguistic capacities and performances. In a distinct but related way, comparative ethologists might try to discover the precursors of human language capacities and performances in the capacities and performances of nonhuman species (see Lieberman 1984). Articulation of mathematical models for linguistic structure provides another example of theoretical foundationalism. Investigations of the properties of mathematical systems might even be thought to bear on the adequacy of devices of grammatical representation. (For some applications of mathematical techniques to the understanding of language acquisition, see Wexler and Culicover 1980.)
Bibliography Bennett J 1976 Linguistic Behaviour. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Chomsky N 1986 Knowledge of Language Its Nature. Origin. and Use. Praeger, New York Fodor J A, Bever J G, Garrett M F 1974 The Psychology of Language. McGraw-Hill, New York Harris Z 1964 Distributional structure. In: Fodor J A, Katz J J (eds.) The Structure of Language. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ Katz J J 1981 Language and Other Abstract Objects. Blackwell, Oxford Lieberman P 1984 The Biology and Evolution of Language. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Sampson G 1975 The Form of Language. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London Skinner B F 1957 Verbal Behavior. Appleton-CenturyCrofts, New York Wexler K, Culicover P W1980 Formal Principles of Language Acquisition. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA

There is no straightforward relation between positions on questions about ontological and epistemological foundations. Someone who accepts a psychologistic account might but need not be an intuitionist; s/he might reject intuitionism in favor of a psycholinguistic approach. Perhaps more surprisingly, a Platonist might adopt the same intuitionistic approach to epistemological foundations as a rival psychologistic theorist. Of course, in treating users' intuitions as authoritatively justificatory, these rival theorists will interpret them differently—the 'psychologist' will interpret them as evidence about competence, whereas the Platonist will interpret them as evidence (on the

Instrumentalism
P.Carr

The term 'instrumentalism' is used in the philosophy of science to describe a particular way of interpreting scientific theories, and the terms embedded in those
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theories. Instrumentalism is usually defined in contradistinction to 'realism.' Realist philosophies of science claim that scientific theories describe a reality over

Linguistic Philosophy and above observable events, a reality which may not be directly observable, but which causes those events to occur. A realist, for instance, would interpret the term 'gravitational force' as describing a physical reality which brings about certain observable events, such as objects falling to earth and airplanes remaining within the earth's orbit. It may not be possible to observe gravitational force directly, but its existence is postulated as a causal factor in bringing about a wide range of events which are observable. The instrumentalist claims that such an interpretation of theoretical constructs is unwarranted, and all that can be justifiably asserted about terms like 'gravitational force' is that they permit a certain measure of success in predicting and ordering the events in question. The instrumentalist's objection is to the idea of a nonobservable reality 'hidden,' as it were, behind observable events. The emphasis, for the instrumentalist, is on science as being concerned with that which is strictly observable. A case of conflict between realist and instrumentalist views of science, which is often cited, concerns the realist interpretation given by Galileo of the heliocentric theory concerning the Earth and the sun. The objection raised by the Catholic Church was not to the theory per se, but to Galileo's realist interpretation of it, under which it was held to describe a physical reality (the earth's solar system). The Church was prepared to accept only an instrumentalist interpretation of the theory, under which it was seen merely as a useful means of predicting movements of heavenly bodies. Instrumentalist views of science have been common throughout the history of science (for an introduction to the issues, set in a historical perspective, see Popper 1963). In the twentieth century, when the theory of the atom first began to be developed, many physicists wished to deny the reality of atoms, and to accept an instrumentalist interpretation of atomic theory. Instrumentalist interpretations of science were common among the group of philosophers, active in the 1930s, known as the Vienna Circle. Their philosophical position, known as logical positivism, influenced work done in linguistics in America at the time; and this is said to be evident in the work of the PostBloomfieldians (see, for instance, Twaddell 1957 for an instrumentalist interpretation of phonological constructs). For the Post-Bloomfieldians, if linguistics were to be scientific, it must concern itself with observable events, and not with, for instance, unobservable 'mental states.' Chomsky is said to have rejected such instrumentalism in favor of a realist interpretation of linguistic theory, under which theoretical terms refer to unobservable linguistic realities which lie behind observable linguistic behavior. For Chomsky, these are mental states (see Chomsky 1986). Although Chomsky's realist interpretation of linguistic theory is widely accepted within generative linguistics, it is common to find generative linguists withholding any bold claims as to the reality of the objects, structures, and relations they postulate. In one generative theory of syntax which emerged in the 1980s, there was an explicit denial as to the psychological reality of the objects and structures postulated. However, to deny that one's theory characterizes a psychological reality need not commit one to instrumentalism. A realist interpretation could be supplied for those objects which is not psychological in nature. (For a fuller account of instrumentalism in linguistics, cf. Carr 1990: ch. 3.) See also: Realism.
Bibliography Carr P1990 Linguistic Realities. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Chomsky N 1986 Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use. Praeger, New York Popper K 1963 Three views concerning human knowledge. In: Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London Twaddell W F 1957 On denning the phoneme. In: Joos M B (ed.) Readings in Linguistics, vol. 1. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL

Linguistic Philosophy
L. J. Cohen

'Linguistic philosophy' is the name often given to the conception of philosophical problems as problems about meaning or meanings. Until the twentieth century, no important philosopher held all philo-

sophical problems to be of this nature. For example, Hobbes (1651) thought that truth consists in 'the right ordering of names in our affirmations,' and asked whether, in a language in which predication was ex25

Language, Metaphysics, and Ontology pressed by the adjunction of subject and predicate rather than by a copula, there would be any terms equivalent to 'entity,' 'essence,' or 'essentiality.' But Hobbes's account of political obligation was not linguistic: a citizen's obligation to obey the law, he thought, arises out of the social contract that all citizens make with one another to obey a sovereign who will protect them. However, in the first half of the twentieth century, a more comprehensively linguistic approach to philosophy was encouraged or developed, along at least seven different, though interrelated, lines.
1. Linguistic Approaches to Philosophy 1.1 Frege's (1893) and Russell's (1903) Project for the Reduction of Mathematics to Logic

the principal objective in view. So, among many who attended Moore's lectures at Cambridge, or read his articles, philosophy became the critique of language. But Moore himself never explicitly endorsed such a conception of philosophy, and he was quite ready on occasion to philosophize in a nonlinguistic mode, as when he argued that the most valuable things imaginable are the pleasures of personal affection and the enjoyment of beautiful objects (1903). He also (1942: 660-67) explicitly rejected the view that philosophy should be concerned with the meanings of verbal expressions as distinct from the analysis of concepts or propositions. 1.3 Wittgenstein's Claim (1922) that the Purpose of Philosophy is the Logical Clarification of Thoughts Philosophy, on this view, is not a theory but an activity, and the result of philosophy is not a number of philosophical propositions but just to make propositions clear. In his later work (1953), Wittgenstein retained his opposition to philosophical 'theories' while stressing the enormous variety of ways in which language functions and the role which it plays in creating philosophical puzzlement. Legitimate progress is then to be made only by assembling detailed examples, without making any generalizations. Such a view of philosophy, however, also cuts itself off from the right to articulate the professed conception of philosophy in general terms. As a consequence, Wittgenstein's approach to philosophy is more easily seen to promote discussion of Wittgenstein's own intentions and achievements than to encourage imitation. However, Schlick (1930); Waismann (1965); Malcolm (1972), and others have acknowledged their debt to his conception of philosophy, and the details of his arguments on particular issues have been widely influential. 1.4 A View of the Characteristic Task of Philosophy Ayer (1936), Ryle (1949), Hare (1952), and others held the view that philosophy has as its characteristic task the explicit analysis of conceptual thought. Philosophy, so conceived, differs on the one side from the study of the facts about which people think and on the other from the psychological study of the processes of thinking. Its distinctive objects are best seen as the meanings of the words, phrases, or sentences that express the thoughts to be analyzed. It is often occupied with mismatches between the superficial grammatical appearance of a sentence and its underlying logical form or conceptual structure. Thus Ryle (1949), for example, argued that those who ask how a person's mind is related to his body are making what he called a 'category-mistake': they are treating the word 'mind' as if it belongs to the same, locatableentity category as the word 'body'; they are treating the word 'vanity' as if it belongs to the same category as 'feeling'; and so on. Similarly, legitimate areas of philosophical puzzlement about knowledge, say, or

In this project, all arithmetical concepts were to be defined hi terms of logical ones and all arithmetical truths were to be shown provable from logical ones. Thus the correct philosophy of mathematics was to be rigorously and conclusively demonstrated. The project itself encountered a number of deep-seated difficulties; but it nevertheless inspired many philosophers to think it worthwhile exploring the possibilities of exact formal-logical analysis in regard to other areas of language use. Among such searches for logically ideal languages or language fragments, one could list Carnap's (1951) work on the measurement of inductive support, von Wright's (1951) on the logic of obligation, Hempel's on the structure of scientific explanation, Hintikka's (1962) on the relations between knowledge and belief, Prior's (1957) on the role of verb tense in statements about past, present, and future, Plantinga's (1974) on the nature of necessity, and so on. Not all these writers have confined themselves to the linguistic method of philosophizing; but they all contributed towards exploring its possibilities. 1.2 Moore's Minute Analysis of His Contemporaries' Writings (e.g., Bradley, Russell, Stout) By exposing layer after layer of ambiguity in another philosopher's statements, G. E. Moore (1922) dissected the apparently tenable from the apparently untenable in ways that seldom failed to leave his mark on the problem. He thus introduced strikingly higher levels of rigor into the discussion of important questions in epistemology and metaphysics, such as issues about sense data or other minds, where formal-logical techniques of analysis, like those practiced by Frege and Russell on mathematical issues, are inappropriate or unproductive. And, as his work demonstrated the value of discussing philosophical issues in a more precise linguistic style, it was natural to believe that a certain type of philosophical analysis consisted in just such discussion. Indeed, where it turns out that the only justifiable conclusions about these issues are of relatively little interest, the achievement of precision, rather than the truth of what is made precise, becomes
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Linguistic Philosophy moral duties, or political activity, were held by many to be confined to issues discussable in linguistic terms. Examples were, respectively, the determination of necessary and sufficient conditions for predicating 'He knows that...' of someone, the definition of'duty' in terms of universal imperatives, and examination of the vocabulary of political dialogue. 1.5 Philosophical Concern about How Language Itself Functions The concept of meaning has been much discussed, and attention has been particularly focused on the role played by truth-conditions (Davidson 1984), verifiability (Ayer 1936), social conventions (Lewis 1969), or psychological factors (Grice 1957) in an adequate theory of meaning. A connected topic is the theory of reference, including questions about what the world has to be like for reference to be possible (Strawson 1959). 1.6 Quine's Holism W. V. O. Quine (1953) argued that linguistic philosophers like Ayer (1936) are wrong to suppose that sentences expressing beliefs can be divided into two fundamentally different groups—those that are thought acceptable in virtue of empirically detectable facts, and those that are thought true solely in virtue of their meanings, such as My brother is in London and My brother is my sibling, respectively. Instead, all beliefs are at risk before the tribunal of experience, though each individual may be more reluctant to change some than others. Nevertheless, Quine (1960) endorsed the methodological strategy of what he calls 'semantic assent.' By semantic assent, speakers may, according to Quine, avoid difficulties that arise in talking about the existence or nature of certain alleged things, events, or processes: they are to talk instead about the contexts in which it is appropriate to use those things' names. Correspondingly, the underlying structure of mathematical and scientific theories is best disclosed by regimenting them into a logically more perspicuous notation. 1.7 Ordinary Language Philosophy This is the philosophical perspective principally associated with J. L. Austin and his followers, as articulated in Austin's seminal paper (Austin 1957) and discussed in more detail in the article Ordinary Language Philosophy. The idea is that, by attention to the fine nuances of actual linguistic usage, a philosopher can notice important conceptual distinctions and relations which might provide new insights into traditional philosophical problems, including those of knowledge, ethics, and mind.
2. Linguistic Philosophy in the 1990s

'linguistic,' sometimes because of the problems with which it dealt (Sects. 1.4, 1.5), sometimes because of the methods that it adopted (Sects. 1.1,1.2, 1.6), and sometimes because of the claims that it asserted (Sects. 1.3, 1.7). Since about 1960, however, analytical philosophers have progressively tended to take up less doctrinaire positions. For example, it is generally seen as a legitimate philosophical enterprise to discuss the rival merits of appealing to a presumptive social contract, or to the maximization of human happiness, for the foundations of justice (rather than merely focusing on the meanings of the terms used or the status of the speech acts involved). Substantive ethical issues about abortion, euthanasia, reverse discrimination, etc., are also thought legitimate subjects of philosophical debate. The results of psychological experiments are no longer regarded as being outside the domain of philosophical interest, since they may affect issues about memory, belief, rationality, etc. Nor is the nature of time, or of matter, thought a suitable topic for discussion by philosophers unacquainted with relevant areas of theoretical physics. Those who still assert a comprehensively linguistic conception of philosophy, such as Dummett (1978: 458), have become rather rare.
Bibliography Austin J L 1957 A plea for excuses. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (reprinted in Austin J L 1961) Austin J L 1961 Philosophical Papers. Clarendon Press, Oxford Ayer A J 1936 Language, Truth and Logic. Gollancz, London Carnap R 1951 Logical Foundations of Probability. Routledge and Regan Paul, London Davidson D 1984 Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Clarendon Press, Oxford Dummett M A E 1978 Truth and Other Enigmas. Duckworth, London Frege G 1893 Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, begriffschriftlich abgeleitet. H Pohle, Jena Grice H P 1957 Meaning. The Philosophical Review 66: 37788 Hare R M 1952 The Language of Morals. Clarendon Press, Oxford Hintikka J 1962 Knowledge and Belief. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York Hobbes T 1651 Leviathan. J. M. Dent and Sons, London Lewis D K 1969 Convention: A Philosophical Study. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Malcolm N 1972 Problems of Mind: Descartes to Wittgenstein. Allen and Unwin, London Moore G E 1922 Philosophical Studies. Kegan Paul, London Moore G E 1942 A reply to my critics. In: Schilpp P A (ed.) The Philosophy ofGE Moore. Northwestern University, Evanston, Chicago, IL Plantinga A 1974 The Nature of Necessity. Clarendon Press, Oxford Prior A N 1957 Time and Modality. Clarendon Press, Oxford Quine W V O 1953 From a Logical Point of View. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Quine W V O 1960 Word and Object. Technology Press, Cambridge, MA

In the first half of the twentieth century, analytical philosophy was describable as comprehensively

Logical positivism—known also as scientific or logical empiricism—was a movement that flourished in Vienna during the early decades of the twentieth century. The overall aim of its members was to make philosophy 'scientific.' They took this to mean, in general terms, that the concepts, the methods, and the language used by philosophers should be made more rigorous and exact, and that philosophers should be induced to eschew all forms of vague, untestable, or transcendental speculation. More specifically, a central tenet of logical positivism was the thesis that any significant discourse must comprise either substantive, empirically testable claims about the world, or merely formal, analytical propositions that do no more than record the adoption of certain conventions governing the use of signs. Logical positivism thus attempted to combine the radical empiricism of Hume and Mach with the conventionalism of Poincare and the new logic of Frege and Russell. The claims made by traditional metaphysicians were stigmatized by the Vienna positivists as 'unscientific,' that is, as incomprehensible 'pseudo-claims' lacking all cognitive content.
1. Historical Origins

As early as 1907 a group of Viennese scientists had begun meeting regularly to discuss the philosophical problems which arose in the foundations of their various disciplines. They included Philipp Frank, a physicist, Hans Hahn, a mathematician, and Otto Neurath, a sociologist, economist, and polymath. The dominant influence on this group was Ernst Mach, who had held the newly created Chair of History and Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences in the University of Vienna, 1895-1901. It was not, however, until 1922, when Moritz Schlick came to Vienna to occupy that chair, that the Vienna Circle was properly constituted. To begin with, the Circle was merely an informal
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group of like-minded thinkers who met in Schlick's house on Thursday evenings to discuss philosophical problems. By 1928, however, they had founded the Ernst Mach Society, and their manifesto, aptly titled Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung: Der Wiener Kreis (The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle), was published a year later. From 1928 to 1938 the Circle published a substantial number of monographs on logic, language, mathematics, science, and theory of knowledge. The list of philosophers and scientists who were members of the Circle is distinguished. In addition to Schlick and the others already mentioned, it includes Gustav Bergmann, Rudolf Carnap, Herbert Feigl, Felix Kaufmann, Kurt G6del, Victor Kraft, Karl Menger, Bela von Juhos, and Friedrich Waismann. Other philosophers and scientists, although not strictly a part of the Circle, were in close and sympathetic contact with its members for some or all of this period. They include, amongst others, Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, A. J. Ayer, Kurt Grelling, Albert Einstein, Carl Hempel, Stanislaw Lesniewski, Jan Lukasiewicz, Arne Naess, Karl Popper, W. V. O. Quine, Hans Reichenbach, Alfred Tarski, Richard von Mises, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Circle continued, under Schlick's leadership, as a coherent group for nearly 15 years, until the rise of National Socialism and the Anschluss forced its members to disperse.
2. Empiricism and Semantics

Central to logical positivism is the goal of establishing the limits and structure of meaningful discourse; and central to the achievement of this goal is the formulation of a criterion of factual meaningfulness or cognitive significance. 'The purpose of this criterion is to delimit the type of expression which has possible reference to fact, from the other types which do not

Methodological Solipsism have this kind of significance: the emotive, the logicomathematical, the merely formal' (Feigl 1943). The criterion itself is empirical: 'there is no way to understand any [factual] meaning without reference to "experience" or "possibility of verification".' (Schlick 1936.) To be intelligible, it was claimed, genuine proper names must stand for objects with which we are acquainted; predicates must stand for observable properties; and sentences must in principle be verifiable in experience. 3. Syntax, Logic, and Mathematics According to the logical positivists, if a true, scientifically useful sentence is not synthetic, verifiable, and knowable only a posteriori, then it must be analytic, tautologous, empty of empirical content, and knowable a priori. Analytic assertions, they believed, are 'linguistic' in the sense that they merely express arbitrary conventions governing the use of signs. The discipline Carnap called the 'logical syntax of language' was intended to investigate the formal properties of different sets of linguistic conventions, both natural and artificial; and his principle of tolerance denied that any such set was intrinsically more accurate or basic than any other: 'it is not our business to set up prohibitions, but to arrive at conventions.' Both formal logic and number theory, it was claimed, consist of conventionally true analytic statements. 4. Pseudo-problems and the Language of Metaphysics One consequence of verificationism eagerly embraced by the positivists was this: many sentences of traditional metaphysics are mere pseudo-sentences, and many traditional problems in philosophy are merely pseudo-problems. Unverifiable statements about the ultimate nature of reality, say, or about God, the soul, moral goodness, or beauty were dismissed as empty and meaningless. In this connection Carnap distinguished between 'internal' and 'external' questions. The former are questions concerning the existence or nature of certain objects that can be answered by meaningful sentences belonging to a particular language. The latter are pseudo-questions which attempt to raise issues independently of the power of any language to answer them. If, for example, a language is constructed whose primitive terms refer to physical objects (or sense data, or numbers), then within this language it will make sense to ask whether there exist such things as physical objects (sense data, or numbers). But if one tries to ask, in general, whether physical objects really exist, say, or whether numbers are parts of the ultimate furniture of the world, then the questions lack content. Problems can only be posed, and solved, within some particular, conventional language; and outside language there is simply nothing to be said. See also: Analyticity; Verificationism. Bibliography
Ayer A J (ed.) 1959 Logical Positivism. Free Press, New York Ayer A J 1971 Language, Truth and Logic. Penguin, Harmondsworth Bergmann G 1954 The Metaphysics of Logical Positivism. Longmans, Green, New York Carnap R 1928 Der logische Aufbau der Welt. WeltkreisVerlag, Berlin (1967 The Logical Structure of the World and Pseudoproblems in Philosophy. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London) Carnap R 1934 Logische Syntax der Sprache. Springer, Vienna (1937 The Logical Syntax of Language. Kegan Paul, London) Feigl H 1943 Logical empiricism. In: Runes D D (ed.) Twentieth Century Philosophy. Philosophical Library, New York Gower B (ed.) 1987 Logical Positivism in Perspective. Croom Helm, London Kraft V 1950 Der Wiener Kreis. Der Ut-sprung des Neopositivismus. Springer, Vienna (1953 The Vienna Circle. The Origins ofNeo-positivism. Philosophical Library, New York) Reichenbach H 1951 The Rise of Scientific Philosophy. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA Schlick M 1936 Meaning and verification. The Philosophical Review 45:339-69

Methodological Solipsism
A. Woodfield

Solipsism is the metaphysical doctrine that nothing exists except one's self or mind. Methodological solipsism, in contrast, is a regulative principle prescribing how psychological states (one's own or anyone else's) should be individuated. Its advocates, far from being

solipsists, are usually realists about the physical environment and the organisms that live within it. They argue that the principle is a legitimate and necessary constraint upon any scientific investigation into how a mind works. The principle has linguistic

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Language, Metaphysics, and Ontology implications. Crudely, it recommends that one should construe prepositional attitude sentences opaquely, by ignoring the referential semantic properties of their embedded 'that' clauses. 1. Defining Methodological Solipsism (MS) Though the term is found in Kant, methodological solipsism in its late-twentieth-century sense was denned by Putnam (1975:220) as 'the assumption that no psychological state, properly so called, presupposes the existence of any individual other than the subject to whom that state is ascribed.' Davidson (1987), criticizing this definition, pointed out that describers or descriptions presuppose things; psychological states do not. To sidestep this, it would be possible to substitute 'constitutively requires' for 'presupposes.' Fodor (1987: 42) defines MS as 'the doctrine that psychological states are individuated without respect to their semantic evaluation.' 2. Identifying Psychological States Mary's knowing that Paris is full of tourists is not a pure psychological state because she cannot be in that state unless Paris is indeed full of tourists, which requires that Paris exists and a lot of tourists exist. 'Know,' and many other psychological verbs, are factives. But Mary's believing that there is a beautiful city full of tourists, on the other hand, is a state that could obtain even if there were no city and no tourists. It appears, then, to be a psychological state properly so called. It seems commonsensical to ignore whether an agent's beliefs are true or false when explaining behavior. The majority of philosophers and psychologists have always accepted this. Suppose that two 'green' individuals, A and B, share many attitudes and aspirations. Each believes that his local atmosphere is dangerously polluted. Because of that belief, each decides not to buy a car. A lives in Mexico City, which is dangerously polluted, while B lives in Copenhagen, which is not. The fact that A's belief is true while B's is false is irrelevant to the fact that their beliefs have the same cognitive role and the same effect. Psychology should try to build upon generalizations of this sort, abstracting from the fact that people inhabit numerically distinct local environments. that the act being explained is a success whose achievement depended upon a belief's being true. Defenders of MS reply that such explanations are hybrids in which contextual truths and relationships are 'woven in' to the description of the agent's mental states and actions. To maximize one's chances of picking up significant generalizations, one should prise off the explanation's external component and then try to describe the agent's mind and behavior in a presuppositionless way. Some rationales for MS rely on strong philosophical assumptions about the nature of the mind. Stich (1983) defends a principle of the autonomy of psychological states: 'the states and processes that ought to be of concern to the psychologist are those that supervene on the current, internal, physical state of the organism.' Any scientific inquiry into how a system works must define the boundary between the system and what lies outside it. Psychology is concerned to discover how the mind works, and the mind is a system that depends on the brain. So, if two people had physically and functionally identical brains, their psychological states ought to be counted as the same. The fact that they have different histories and are in different environments is irrelevant, unless and until such differences cause the two people's current inner states to diverge.
4. Inner States and Cognitive Processes

Fodor (1980) assumes that cognitive processes are computational manipulations of internal symbolic representations. Such operations, in both animals and machines, are purely formal or syntactic. 'Formal operations,' says Fodor, 'are the ones that are specified without reference to such semantic properties of representations as, for example, truth, reference, and meaning.' But, as Stich (1983) is quick to point out, the formality assumption threatens all content-based classifications of psychological states, because content per se is a kind of meaning. Having a sense is a semantic property. If all semantic properties are explanatorily irrelevant, then cognitive science must become entirely syntactic (as Stich recommends). The assumptions made by Stich and Fodor entail conclusions that are stronger than the doctrine of MS defined by Putnam. It is one thing to ignore a belief's truth-value, quite another to refuse to look at the 3. Psychological States and the Explanation of Action conditions under which it would be true. If MS is interNot all explanations abstract from the agent's embed- preted in the latter way, as enjoining that psychodedness in a particular environment, nor is the truth logical states should not be individuated by their of a belief always irrelevant to the explanation. It truth-conditional contents, then psychological states depends on how the behavior is described, and on will be far removed from mental states as normally the type of explanation. Suppose that A and B are conceived. Even then, though, MS does not undercut motivated to sell their old cars. If A's action is all talk of content in cognitive science. Two-factor' described as 'selling A's car,' then B's act is not of that theorists such as Schiffer (1981), McGinn (1982), and type. This merely shows that actions, too, should be Block (1986), hold that a part of a belief's content is individuated according to the MS principle. Suppose its conceptual role, and that this component is

There is less agreement on what 'natural kinds' themselves are than on what natural kind 'terms' are. The latter are a species of general term and fall into two classes, sortal terms and mass terms, though not all terms in these two classes are natural kind terms. Examples falling into the first class are tiger and lemon while examples falling into the second are water and gold. Natural kind terms are often contrasted with terms for artefactual kinds, like pencil and yacht, one important distinguishing feature being that the former but not the latter typically feature in statements of natural scientific law.
1. The Semantics of Natural Kind Terms

According to philosophers like Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam, whose work in this area has been most influential, natural kind terms have a number of distinctive semantic characteristics which set them apart from other general terms. In particular, Kripke holds that natural kind terms are, like proper names, rigid designators and accordingly that they are not definable in terms of complex descriptions in the way that empiricist philosophers like John Locke had supposed. Locke believed that a general term like water signified an abstract idea composed of the ideas of various observable properties which the user of that term took to be the essential or defining characteristics of a certain kind of substance. This abstract idea constituted the 'nominal essence' of water for that speaker, to be distinguished from water's 'real essence,' which Locke took to be its (then unknown) internal physico-chemical constitution and which

modern science has since identified as its molecular structure, H2O. In Locke's view it is a purely contingent fact that water, as ordinary English speakers understand that term, designates H2O. Kripke, by contrast, holds that water rigidly designates H2O and consequently that water is H2O is a necessary truth, albeit not an a priori truth. Putnam has argued that the rigidity of natural kind terms follows from their having a quasi-indexical semantic status, deriving from the role that demonstrated specimens play in the identification of the referents of such terms. For Putnam, gold, for example, refers to any metal which is relevantly similar in its internal physico-chemical structure to the samples which competent users of the term in a specific linguistic community would characterize by saying This is gold. He points out too that one would defer to the opinion of experts when in doubt as to whether something is gold and consequently that the use of such natural kind terms is subject to what he calls a 'division of linguistic labor.' Finally, Putnam contends that although natural kind terms are associated in speakers' minds with 'stereotypes' (for instance, the stereotypical tiger is striped and four-legged), these stereotypes do not, unlike Lockean abstract ideas, determine logically necessary and sufficient conditions for membership of the associated natural kinds.
2. The Ontology of Natural Kinds

As to what natural kinds are, ontologically speaking, no consensus presently exists. Some metaphysicians

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Language, Metaphysics, and Ontology hold a species, like the tiger, to be a set or class of individual animals (or, more sophisticatedly, a function assigning to each possible world a set of individual animals existing in that world). Others regard the species itself as a sprawling, scattered individual of which individual tigers are constituent parts or members, while yet others hold it to be a universal wholly present in each of its individual instances.
Bibliography Schwartz S P (ed.) 1977 Naming, Necessity, and Natural Kinds. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY

Nominalism
D. Bell

Strictly interpreted, nominalism is an ontological theory according to which reality is composed entirely and exclusively of particular items. It entails a denial, that is, of the existence of any intrinsically nonparticular or general entities—for example, properties, relations, species, universals, types, or common characteristics. The mistaken belief that there are such things as these is then diagnosed as resulting from a misconstruction of the way in which common names and general terms function. 1. Strong and Weak Versions On the most austere version of this view, for example, there is nothing whatsoever that all trees (or chisels, or red things) have in common—except for the fact that the term tree (or chisel, or red) is applied to them. Few philosophers have embraced so extreme a view— though Thomas Hobbes came close:
'every [common name], though one name, is nevertheless the name of diverse particular things; in respect of all of which together it is called a universal; there being nothing in the world universal but names, for the things named are every one of them individual and singular1 (Hobbes 165 l:ch. IV)

Less strictly interpreted, nominalism is the name of a tendency, in the sense that a theory is nominalistic to the extent that it successfully restricts assignment of explanatory role to things that are either concrete, or individual, or both. Nominalism, in other words, requires at the very least that one eschew reference either: (a) to abstract objects like sets, numbers, propositions, facts, and truth-values, or (b) to nonparticular, 'predicative' entities like properties, relations, functions, and universals. 2. Issues Relating to Nominalism As this last claim indicates, however, there are in fact two quite separate issues to be considered here.
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2.1 Universals The first has its origins in ancient debates concerning universals and particulars, the one and the many. In this connection there arise the ontological, logical, linguistic, and epistemological problems to do with the distinction between single, individual items, on the one hand, and, on the other, the shareable attributes or general characteristics they have in common. Nominalism of this sort first emerged in the thought of Roscelin, Abelard, and William of Ockham as a rejection of the Platonic doctrine that universals enjoy real, objective existence. The impetus towards nominalism of this kind has a number of sources. One is perhaps a straightforward ontological intuition, to the effect that reality just is particular, and that there is something fishy about the very idea of a general or universal entity. Many nominalists were motivated, for instance, by their failure to see how a universal could be simultaneously and wholly present in a number of different objects, without becoming divided in the process. Another historically important impetus came with the emergence in the Middle Ages of radical empiricism; for if all knowledge and understanding originates in sensory experience, and if such experience only ever provides data that are irreducibly particular, then the claim that we possess any knowledge or understanding of things that are nonparticular can appear highly problematic. Finally, for those who accept the desirability of ontological parsimony—as formulated for instance in the principle known as Ockham's Razor ('entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity')—there is a requirement that universals be dispensed with, if this can be done coherently. 2.2 Abstract Objects The second issue associated with the topic of nominalism has a shorter history than the first, having re-

Ontological Commitment ceived clear formulation only in works of post-Fregean philosophy. The issue concerns the existence of, and the indispensability of our reference to, abstract objects. An abstract object (a proposition, say, or a set) is a particular object, but one that possesses neither spatio-temporal characteristics nor causal powers. This is a different issue from the first, because abstract objects are themselves particular individuals: they do not have instances; they do not inhere in substances; and so the problems concerning the nature of universals, and the relation of universals to the particulars that instantiate them have no special pertinence with respect to them. See also: Ontological Commitment; Ontology; Universals. Bibliography
Carr6 M H 1946 Realists and Nominalists. Oxford University Press, London Field H H 1980 Science without Numbers. A Defense of Nominalism. Blackwell, Oxford Goodman N 1956/4 World of Individuals. The Problem of Universals. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, IN Goodman N, Quine W V O 1947 Steps towards a constructive nominalism. Journal of Symbolic Logic 12:10522 Hobbes T 1962 Leviathan Collins/Fontana, London Loux M J (ed.) 1970 Universals and Particulars: Readings in Ontology. Anchor Books, New York

Ontological Commitment
C. J. Hookway

The world appears to contain many different things: mountains, people, neutrons, battles, numbers, sets, and so on; and both the variety of these objects and their properties can be investigated. However, lists of these different sorts of things are always controversial: nominalists dispute the claim that there are really abstract objects such as sets and numbers; some positivists refuse to countenance theoretical entities such as neutrons; and other philosophers insist on listing events, such as battles, alongside other objects. Somebody is ontologically committed to objects of a certain kind if such objects must exist for their beliefs about the world to be true. It is often thought that standards of simplicity should oblige people to keep their ontological commitments to a minimum; but it is unclear what criteria should be employed in settling whether objects of some kind exist. 1. Criteria of Ontological Commitment It can often be difficult to identify someone's ontological commitments. A sentence which appears on the surface to involve reference to objects of a certain kind may be paraphrased in a way that shows this to be misleading. The lost city of the Incas did not exist' appears to involve reference to a (nonexistent) lost city; the paraphrase 'It is not the case that there was a lost city of the Incas' removes this appearance. Many philosophical 'analyses' offer paraphrases which reduce persons' Ontological commitments: analyzing numbers as sets or inscriptions, social institutions as sets of people, and so on. And it is sometimes argued that sentences carry ontological commitments which

are not apparent from the surface. Donald Davidson has argued, controversially, that asserting 'Shem killed Shaun with a knife' refers not only to Shem, Shaun, and the knife but also makes a covert reference to an event of killing (Davidson 1980: ch. 6). So a rule or criterion is needed which, applied to a set of sentences expressing a theory or corpus of beliefs, determines what the ontological commitments of one who accepts those sentences would be. Quine's paper 'On what there is' (1953: ch. 1) is an early attempt to find such a criterion. Ideally a criterion of ontological commitment would point to a syntactic feature of natural language sentences which always signals acceptance of the existence of objects of a certain kind. Use of singular terms will not provide such a criterion: names of nonexistent things are used; definite descriptions do not always have a referring function; and many things exist which cannot be named or described. Quine proposed that ontological commitments are most explicitly signaled by the existential quantifier: I display my commitment to the existence of neutrons by saying There are neutrons.' Quine has acknowledged the 'triviality' of this view. In fact it can still mislead: there are locutions in ordinary language which appear to have this form but which probably do not carry ontological commitments. Thus application of the criterion requires that sentences first be paraphrased into First Order Logic, the Predicate Calculus. A body of sentences carries ontological commitment to objects of a certain kind if its paraphrase into First Order Logic involves quantification over objects of just that kind.
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Language, Metaphysics, and Ontology translation manual, there is no fact of the matter as to what the ontological commitments of sentence or theory are (Quine 1969: ch. 2). This is Quine's thesis of 'ontological relativity,' a doctrine he describes as a mere corollary of the indeterminacy or inscrutability of reference. Ontology may be less important than often supposed. This does not mean that the criterion is without value. When one examines one's own ontological commitments, these relativities are disguised since one uses the 'identity transformation' as the translation manual: one translates 'rabbit' as 'rabbit,' and so on. Reliance on such a translation manual is deeply embedded in the practice of reflecting on thoughts and 2. Ontological Relativity commitments. But it simply disguises the relativity; If Quine's thesis of the indeterminacy of translation according to Quine, it does not eliminate it. is correct, there are implications for his account of ontological commitment. The indeterminacy of ref- See also: Indeterminacy of Translation; Ontology; erence, a corollary of the more general indeterminacy Universals. thesis, suggests that there is no fact of the matter as Bibliography to what the general terms of a language apply to. Alston W P 1958 Ontological commitment 25. Philosophical By systematically adjusting the translations of other Studies 6:8-16 expressions, one could interpret the same native predi- Church A 1958 Ontological commitment. Journal of Philcate as applying to rabbits, to stages in the history of osophy 55:1008-14 rabbits, to areas of space one mile to the north of Davidson D 1980 Essays on Actions and Events. Clarendon Press, Oxford rabbits, and so on. Any translation, that might be found, would be compatible with all the relevant evi- Meinong A 1960 The theory of objects. In: Cnisholm R M (ed.) Realism and the Background of Phenomenology. The dence. According to the translation manual used in Free Press, Glencoe, IL formalizing the native language and applying Quine's 1953 From a Logical criterion, commitment to an ontology of rabbits, rab- Quine W V OPress, Cambridge, MAPoint of View. Harvard University bit stages, or areas of space, and so on will be found. Quine W V O 1969 Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. At best one can state the ontological commitments of Columbia University Press, New York a theory or theorist relative to a manual for translating Quine W V O 1990 The Pursuit of Truth. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA his speech into our own. Other than relative to a Some philosophers influenced by Meinong, insist that people can talk and think about nonexistent objects; fictional characters might be examples. If one can quantify over nonexistent things, Quine is wrong to believe that existence is what is expressed by the 'existential quantifier.' Others question his reliance upon extensional First Order Logic, claiming that other logics are better equipped for displaying the contents of thoughts. Yet others object than an adequate semantic account of First Order Logic shows that ontological commitments can be carried by expressions other than quantifiers.

Ontology
A. D. Oliver

Ontology is the branch of metaphysics which aims to discover what entities exist and attempts to sort these entities into categories. Examples of such categories are: individuals, events, processes, properties, relations, facts, numbers, classes. Other attempts to categorize the contents of the world lead to crossclassification. For example, entities may be abstract or concrete, actual or merely possible. In constructing metaphysical theories, philosophers are guided by Ockham's razor: 'entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.' Other things being equal, a theory
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is to be preferred if it posits the least number of categories of entity.
1. Quine's Criterion of Ontological Commitment

How do we tell what a theory says there is? We might claim that to each name of the theory's language there corresponds an entity named. But in ordinary discourse we use names of nonexistent objects such as 'Pegasus.' Are we to suppose that Pegasus has a mysterious grade of existence inferior to that of ordinary real objects?

Ordinary Language Philosophy W. V. O. Quine avoids this mystery by taking the vehicles of ontological commitment to be existential quantifiers rather than names. He suggests the following criterion of ontological commitment: 'we are convicted of a particular ontological presupposition if, and only if, the alleged presuppositum has to be reckoned among the entities over which our variables range in order to render one of our affirmations true' (Quine 1980: 13). Or, more tersely, to be is to be the value of a variable. So, for example, mathematics includes the sentence 'there is a prime number which is greater than 1,000.' The existential quantifier in this sentence ranges over prime numbers which must be assumed to exist if this sentence is to be true.
2. What Are Numbers?

problems is to deny the existence of numbers. Given Quine's criterion, to deny the existence of numbers is to deny the literal truth of sentences purporting to quantify over numbers. On such a view, arithmetical sentences are useful fictions that make for smoother science but are, in principle, dispensable. This claim of dispensability must be justified by showing how scientific theories can be expressed without reference to numbers.
3. Respect for Ordinary Discourse

The diverse pressures facing an ontology are well illustrated by the plethora of accounts of number. For example, the goal of Frege's logicist project was to supply an epistemologically secure foundation for arithmetic. Thus Frege attempted to prove arithmetical truths from logic alone by reducing the category of natural numbers to a category of logical objects: classes. Statements quantifying over numbers were viewed as abbreviating statements quantifying over classes. But the commitment to classes is epistemologically problematic. In particular, classes, standardly conceived, have neither causes nor effects. Yet knowledge seems to require some causal commerce with the objects known. Those who cut their ontology to suit their epistemology will supply different accounts of number. For instance, formalists and intuitionists identify numbers with inscriptions and mental constructs, respectively. But these categories of objects cannot supply enough objects to be numbers. Further, numbers look to be necessary existents whereas both inscriptions and mental constructs are contingent existents. A more radical response to the epistemological

Quine's criterion tells us what a theory says there is. To tell what there is we must also know which theories are true. A wide range of methodological and evidential criteria have been proposed as guides to the truth of a theory. It is a vexed question whether these criteria will vindicate the theories implicit in ordinary discourse. A semantics for natural language will inevitably commit the users of that language to various categories of entity. For example, verbs of action might be best characterized as referring to events and modal operators best characterized as quantifiers over possible worlds. Moreover, some have thought syntactic and semantic characteristics of language determine the nature of the entities referred to. For example, Frege took the incompleteness of predicates to indicate an incompleteness of the properties to which the predicates refer. Similarly, some have argued from the vagueness of language to the existence of vague objects in the world. But many metaphysicians have less respect for ordinary language, diagnosing the apparent ontological commitments of our everyday discourse as the result of distinctively human interests and limitations which should not be taken as a guide to what there is.
Bibliography Quine W V O 1980 On what there is. In: From A Logical Point of View, 2nd edn, revised. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA

Ordinary Language Philosophy
L. J. Cohen

'Ordinary Language Philosophy' is the title sometimes given to the views developed at Oxford by J. L. Austin and those influenced by him, or associated with him, in the period 1936-60.

1. The Debt to J. L. Austin

Austin (1957) recommended English-speaking philosophers to study the meanings and uses of English words on the grounds that the ordinary language of
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Language, Metaphysics, and Ontology the English speech community embodies 'the inherited experience and acumen of many generations of men.' By finding out what distinctions are implicitly present in the English vocabulary of some nontechnical activity, such as that of making excuses, one is sure, he said, to discover something worth knowing, however much one may also need to study the relevant technical requirements of jurisprudence or psychology. Hence, one would do well to begin by consulting some fairly concise English dictionary, so as to make a complete list of the terms relevant to the chosen topic. In this way, one may perhaps come across such facts as that a high percentage of the terms connected with excuses prove to be adverbs (as if most excuses depend not on what has been done but on the manner, state of mind, etc., in which it was done). In pursuit of such an inquiry, one may also expect 'the fun of discovery, the pleasures of cooperation, and the satisfaction of reaching agreement.' Austin (1962) applied this conception of philosophy to important issues in pragmatics as well as in semantics. He distinguished the locutionary act of saying something (e.g., It's cold), the illocutionary act performed in saying it (e.g., requesting the hearer to close the window), and the perlocutionary act achieved by saying it (e.g., persuading the hearer to close the window). This aspect of his work was further developed after Austin's early death by J. R. Searle (1969) and others. It should be noticed, however, that ordinary language philosophy, in Austin's style, need not be confined to problems about the terminology and structure of everyday, nontechnical speech. Achinstein (1968; 1983) showed how it can be usefully applied also to certain problems in the philosophy of science. He contrasted what he called the 'positivist' approach to these problems with his own. Positivists, such as Quine (I960) and Hempel (1965), wanted to replace the actual linguistic procedures of science by supposedly superior ones—procedures that are logically perspicuous. But Achinstein himself wanted to characterize them as they are. So, on his view, explanation, for example, was to be analyzed as a certain kind of illocutionary act, and not as a locutionary act that asserts, say, a covering law, as Hempel's model proposes.
2. The Limits of Ordinary Language Philosophy

compared with Chomsky's attitude toward syntax. Like Chomsky, they sought, in effect, to characterize competence, not performance. They aimed at constructing a consistent and coherent idealization of ordinary usage, not a tabulation of its actual practice that includes all the malapropisms, solecisms, and other anomalies that in fact occur. They were therefore responsive to the intuitions of language-speakers, rather than to the statistics of people's linguistic practices, as their basic source of relevant information. Ordinary language philosophy has sometimes been called 'Oxford Philosophy'; but this is a misnomer. Several prominent Austinians lived in Oxford for only a few years, mainly as students (such as Searle and Achinstein), and developed their philosophical ideas subsequently in the USA, while Austin himself had several prominent colleagues at Oxford who were not converted to his way of doing philosophy (such as Ryle, Kneale, Strawson, Dummett, and Williams). Wittgenstein's later philosophy (1953; 1956, etc.) is sometimes regarded as a form of ordinary language philosophy; but this too is a mistake. Wittgenstein's views were certainly not influenced by Austin, since they began to develop several years earlier; and Berlin (1973: 11) states that Wittgenstein's views had little effect on Austin's circle. Moreover, there were also important differences between the two philosophical methodologies. Wittgenstein did not regard his philosophical thoughts as being relevant to a particular natural language, and from the start they were published in both English and German versions. But Austin explicitly professed to occupy himself with English, even if many of his remarks about English could have been matched by corresponding remarks about other natural languages. Wittgenstein thought of all philosophical theories as arising from the bewitchment of human intelligence by language, and he certainly rejected the idea that he himself was advocating any kind of philosophical theory or generalization. But Austin thought that some philosophical theories— mainly his own—were correct. Wittgenstein's recommendation to ask for the use of a word, not its meaning, tended to blur the difference between semantic and pragmatic issues, whereas Austin sought to show the importance of that difference.
3. Achievements

The expression 'ordinary language' is therefore to be understood in this context as meaning normal language, whether technical or nontechnical. But neither Austin nor his followers would have agreed with Naess (1947) that the proper way for philosophers to pursue their inquiries into ordinary language is by using the techniques of opinion-polling and statistical data collection that have been developed in sociology and social psychology. In this respect, the Austinians' attitude toward semantics and pragmatics may be
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Ordinary language philosophy had two principal achievements. First, it forced all those who entered into any kind of dialogue with its supporters to keep a sharp eye open for fine nuances and subtleties of linguistic usage, which they might otherwise have neglected, in the exposition or criticism of philosophical arguments. Second, it provided the first fruitful system of ideas for the foundations of pragmatics. However, it began to lose its cutting edge in the 1960s, along with other doctrinaire forms of linguistic philosophy.

The philosophy of science asks what counts as evidence in science, how theories are tested, what the nature of scientific knowledge is, and indeed whether there are any clear senses in which scientific knowledge can be distinguished from non-scientific knowledge. Similarly, the philosophy of mathematics asks what the nature of mathematical inquiry is, and the philosophy of the social sciences asks to what extent the social sciences are distinct from the natural sciences. The philosophy of linguistics is parallel to these endeavors: it asks what the nature of linguistic inquiry is; what the object of inquiry is; what counts as evidence in linguistics; how theories are tested; to what extent the methods adopted in the various branches of linguistics are parallel to those of the natural sciences. The philosophy of linguistics is often referred to by other names. One of these is 'foundations of linguistics.' Because these questions concern the nature of theorizing in linguistics, i.e., have theories themselves as their object of inquiry, the endeavor is often referred to as metatheory (theory about theories). Another term used is 'methodology,' since the questions crucially concern the nature of linguistic method (although the term 'methodology' is also used in a more specific way, when discussing, for instance, the way in which a particular investigation is carried out). Here, potentially misleading terminological matters will be dealt with, which will provide a little more detail about the sorts of problem which arise in the philosophy of linguistics.

1. Philosophy of Linguistics and of Language The terms 'philosophy of linguistics,' 'philosophy of language,' and 'linguistic philosophy' are not synonyms, even though there are questions which they share. The philosophy of language (see Devitt and Sterelny 1987) is a branch of philosophy which deals with the relationship between language, knowledge, and reality. It asks, for instance, whether it is possible to make a systematic distinction between these three domains, whether and to what extent 'reality' is language-dependent. To consider the relationship between language, reality, and knowledge is to consider the nature of linguistic meaning. Because of this, there is no clear dividing line between semantic theory and the philosophy of language. Linguistic philosophy denotes an approach to philosophy which has emerged in the evolution of twentieth-century philosophy, especially in the English-speaking world. It seeks to address traditional philosophical questions in a new way, by asking about philosophical terms themselves and the way they are used. Thus, with classical problems like 'the mind/body problem,' it is held that much of what was taken to constitute the problem arose from the very terms used; if philosophers examined the terms themselves, it is claimed, problems like this might well simply dissolve. The 'linguistic turn' in philosophy put the philosophy of language much more at the center of philosophy than it had been previously. A central figure in linguistic philosophy is Ludwig
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Language, Metaphysics, and Ontology able phenomena themselves which constitute the object of inquiry in linguistics. Chomsky is not an empiricist in this sense, because he denies that observable behavior constitutes the object of linguistic inquiry. The term 'conceptualism' as used by Katz (1981), is equivalent to the term 'psychologism' (as described in Foundations of Linguistics. It denotes a position which claims that linguistic objects are speakerinternal states of affairs (i.e., mental states). Chomsky (1995) is the best known advocate of this position. His is an internalist philosopher of linguistics, in that the object of linguistic inquiry is, for him, strictly mind-internal in a special sense: it is a specifically linguistic cognitive state which contains an 'austere' computational procedure, austere in the sense of having very limited access to perceptual systems of behavior. The objects of inquiry are a geneticallyencoded, specifically linguistic initial cognitive state and the individual 'final states' (referred to informally as 'knowing a language') which are said to be manifestations of that initial state. Despite his avowed internalism, Chomsky appears to allow that observable behavior may be said to be linguistic since it is exposure to 'linguistic experience' ('primary linguistic 2. Philosophies of Linguistics data') which is said to trigger the transition from As in most areas of philosophy, 'isms' abound in the initial to final state. The relation between internal 'philosophy of linguistics.' (The entry Foundations of linguistic cognitive states and observable external beLinguistics describes five of these: psychologism, Pla- havior is, for Chomsky, one of internalization/ tonism, behaviorism, conventionalism, and instru- externalization. It is arguable that this conception of mentalism.) Katz (1981) outlines three main positions the relation undermines any attempt at radical in the philosophy of linguistics: realism, nominalism, internalism, since, in allowing that language may and conceptualism. Some commentary on the be internalized one is, arguably, conceding that it relationship between these terms, and extent to which may be mind-external. An alternative conception of the relation between radically internal language and they overlap, is therefore necessary. One can align Katz's terms with those cited in the the observable products of speakers' behavior is given Foundations of Linguistics entry. For Katz (1981), by Burton-Roberts (1994), who claims that the latter 'realism' means Platonic realism. This is therefore not are produced in aid of physically representing the entirely equivalent to realism in the philosophy of former, without themselves being linguistic. Hence the science. There, realist interpretations of theoretical relation is conventional. constructs assume that they correspond to extratheoretical entities. Thus, Chomsky is a realist in the Bibliography latter sense, but not in the Platonic sense: he takes Baker G, Hacker P 1984 Language, Sense, and Nonsense. Blackwell, Oxford linguistic theories to refer to extra-theoretical states Burton-Roberts N 1994 Ambiguity, sentence and utterance: (mental states), but not to Platonic states of affairs. a representational approach. Transactions of the PhiloThe term 'realism' in the philosophy of language has logical Society 92: 179-212 a somewhat wider sense than the same term in the Chomsky N 1986 Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin philosophy of science: while realism in the philosophy and Use. Praeger, New York of language concerns terms in general, scientific Chomsky N 1995 Language and nature. Mind 104: 1-61 Devitt M, Sterelny K 1987 Language and Reality: an Introrealism concerns scientific terms. duction to the Philosophy of Language. Blackwell, Oxford Nominalism denies that there are linguistic realities over and above the observable, strictly physical, Hkonen E1978 Grammatical Theory and Metascience. Benjamins, marks on paper and noises in the air which many Katz J Amsterdam J 1981 Language and Other Abstract Objects. linguists take to be manifestations of language, rather Blackwell, Oxford than language per se. It is, therefore, an instru- Kripke S A 1982 Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language: mentalist position. Closely related to this position are An Elementary Exposition. Blackwell, Oxford empiricism and the version of empiricism known as Wittgenstein L 1958 Philosophical Investigations. Blackwell, behaviorism; they share the view that it is the observOxford
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Wittgenstein. His ideas on, for instance, what it is to follow a rule of a language (see Wittgenstein 1958, Kripke 1982), are equally well described as belonging to any of the three fields that have been defined. Some scholars, such as Baker and Hacker (1984) have attempted to use the work of Wittgenstein to show that theoretical linguistics simply has no object of inquiry. Others, such as Itkonen (1978) have used Wittgenstein to support the view that theoretical linguistics not only has an object of inquiry, but is autonomous with respect to neighboring disciplines. Wittgenstein sought to show that the notion of private language was incoherent, that the notion of a rule of language can be given a coherent interpretation only if the individual speaker is not considered in isolation from his speech community. This is the argument against 'private language/ Itkonen has tried to show that Chomsky's conception of linguistic reality is tantamount to the claim that there may be private rules of language, and is therefore incoherent. Chomsky (1986) has replied that Wittgensteinian skepticism about rules as speaker-internal states is simply a version of the refusal to postulate underlying realities for observed behavior.

Rationalism

Rationalism
J. Cottingham

The term 'rationalism' is standardly used in histories of philosophy to contrast with 'empiricism.' Rationalists (from the Latin ratio 'reason') are said to maintain that knowledge can be arrived at by reason alone, independently of the senses, while empiricists (Greek empeiria 'experience') take it that there can be no knowledge which is not ultimately derived from sensory inputs. The classification is perhaps most familiar in textbooks of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy, where the 'British empiricists,' Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, are routinely contrasted with the 'continental rationalists,' Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. But this blunt and schematic contrast is in many respects misleading; the 'rationalist' Descartes, for example, insists on the vital importance of sensory observation in testing scientific theories, while the 'empiricist' Locke, though asserting that 'all our knowledge is founded in experience,' nonetheless stresses the crucial role played, in the development of knowledge, by the mind's own active faculties for combining, comparing, and abstracting from sensory data.
1. Innate Ideas

sensory inputs there could be no knowledge. But though the hammer blows are necessary, the internal veining is also necessary to explain the final shape. And similarly, a crude empiricism that appeals to sensory input alone is insufficient to explain knowledge of certain fundamental and universal principles of logic and mathematics; an innate prestructuring of the human mind must also be invoked.
2. A Universal Language of Thought

Despite its problems, the rationalist/empiricist distinction does provide a useful focus for a number of central issues in the philosophy of language. The most important of these is the issue of'innateness'. Rationalists like Descartes, following a tradition that goes back as far as Plato, maintained that the human mind at birth is already imprinted with certain innate 'ideas'—a term which covered both concepts (such as the concept of God or of triangularity) and also propositions or principles (such as the principle of noncontradiction in logic). This implies, in effect, that there is a kind of innate language—a language of thought—which all human beings are born knowing. The term 'knowing' is a slippery one in this context, since it is clear that young children, for example, do not possess any explicit awareness of principles like the law of noncontradiction; and this led Locke and others to dismiss the whole notion of innate ideas. To this innatists replied that the knowledge in question might be present implicitly; in a suggestive analogy used by Leibniz in his New Essays on Human Understanding (ca. 1704), the human mind at birth is likened to a block of marble—not a uniform block indifferently suited to receive any shape the sculptor may choose to impose on it, but one already veined in a certain pattern. In this metaphor, the blows of the sculptor's hammer are likened to sensory inputs: without them there could be no sculpture, just as without

There is some similarity between the issues addressed in these early debates and the linguistic controversy over Noam Chomsky's notion of a 'universal grammar.' Just as Chomsky argues that the mind must be endowed from birth with certain deep structural principles which enable the young child to learn any language on the basis of very meager and defective linguistic data, so the earlier 'rationalists' argued for the theory of innate ideas by citing human ability to perceive and acknowledge fundamental conceptual and logical truths, whose validity is recognized as extending far beyond those cases which have actually been perceived by the senses. In both cases, what makes the argument persuasive, or at the very least challenging, is its insistence on the need to explain the gap between the limited actual empirical input in early life and the richness and scope of the eventual abilities (whether logical or linguistic) which all human beings normally develop. The idea of a universal language of human thought is a pervasive one in rationalist philosophy, and is not confined to discussions of the innateness question. In the seventeenth century, the notion is often connected with a belief in a divine creator who has illuminated our minds with (at least some of) the fundamental principles which govern the universe as a whole. In a famous pronouncement, Galileo declared in // Saggiatore (1623) that 'The great book of the universe cannot be understood unless one can read the language in which it is written—the language of mathematics.' Some years later, Descartes announced his revolutionary program for the mathematicization of physics in closely similar terms. The qualitative language of earlier scholastic philosophy was resolutely to be avoided; all scientific explanations were to be couched in quantitative terms. 'I recognize no matter in corporeal objects,' wrote Descartes, 'apart from what the geometers call quantity... i.e., that to which every kind of division, shape and motion is applicable' (Principles of Philosophy 1644). Part of what this new program involved was a rejection of the ordinary language of the senses, with its supposedly 'com39

Language, Metaphysics, and Ontology monsense' vocabulary of terms like 'warm,' 'wet,' 'hard,' 'heavy,' 'bitter,' 'smooth.' Such terms may be applied on the basis of sensory experiences which are vivid enough, yet the rationalists argued that they lacked the transparency and precision of mathematical terms. 'Sensible properties are in fact occult properties,' wrote Leibniz later in the seventeenth century, 'and there must be others more manifest which could render them more understandable.'
3. Characteristica UniversaKs

A recurring dream of rationalism was that of a characteristica universails—a clear, precise, and universal symbolic alphabet in terms of which the whole of human knowledge might be represented. It is probably fair to say that the philosophical consensus nowadays is that any such aspiration is radically misconceived. Briefly, there seem to be two major obstacles in its way. The first is the problem of 'commensurability': it is hard to see how the languages of different

branches of science (and perhaps even of different theories within the same branch) can be readily intertranslatable, or reducible to a common currency of 'neutral' or universal symbols. And the second is the problem of 'justification': it is hard to see how traditional rationalism could defend its claim to have discovered the master vocabulary or canonical language which describes the universe 'as it really is.' Many of the issues involved here are complex and still unresolved. What is clear is the enduring importance of the rationalist tradition in philosophy, if only because so much contemporary philosophy of language and theory of meaning defines itself by its opposition to that tradition. See also: A Priori; Chomsky, Noam; Innate Ideas.
Bibliography Cottingham J 1984 Rationalism. Paladin Books, London Chomsky N 1966 Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in The History of Rationalist Thought. Harper and Row, New York

Realism
A. Weir

Dictionaries of philosophy tend to define the philosophical doctrine of realism along the following lines: realism is the view that the entities one takes to exist, do so independently of our minds and mental powers. Realism thus explicated is then contrasted with idealism, which holds that the items of everyday experience or scientific investigation are in some sense mental constructs.
1. Historical Context

Historically two specific forms of realism are often distinguished: (a) medieval realism regarding the existence of properties; (b) the dispute between direct realists on the one hand and phenomenalists and representationalists on the other. In the first dispute, realists argued that predicates such as 'is wise' stand for mind-independent correlates—here the property of wisdom, just as names such as 'Socrates' stand for independently existing objects. Their opponents argued that 'is wise' can apply meaningfully and truly to mind-independent objects without it being the case that it too stood for some mind-independent entity.
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Insofar as predicates designate anything at all, they designate mind-dependent entities such as concepts. Direct realists in perception argued for a distinction between first the act of perceiving, second its content—e.g., that a tree is in front of me—and finally the object of perception. The latter, where it exists, is a mind-independent entity, the direct realist maintains, whereas the act of perceiving and its content are clearly mind-dependent. Opponents of direct realism reject the distinction between act, content, and object in perception and hence maintain that the immediate objects of perception are mind-dependent entities— ideas, sense data, and so forth. Both disputes, then, exemplify the general pattern—realism affirms mindindependence for some sort of entity, idealism or antirealism denies it.
2. 'Realism'In Philosophy

In analytical philosophy 'realism versus antirealism' seems to be used to cover two somewhat different sets of problems. The first concerns scientific realism which is usually contrasted with forms of instrumentalism.

Realism The instrumentalist distinguishes between observational and theoretical sectors of language and maintains that only sentences of the former sector are objectively true or false. Theoretical sentences are instrumentalistically useful to the extent that their observational consequences turn out to be true but truth for the theoretical sector consists in nothing more than such predictive utility. For the scientific realist, by contrast, even if one can draw a significant distinction between observational and theoretical sectors, which some doubt, there is no difference in respect of truth: sentences from either sector are rendered true or false by a mind-independent world. Scientific realism is also often taken to include the antiskeptical view that science inevitably progresses, if correctly pursued, closer and closer to the truth, and that the theoretical terms of current science are not empty but refer to mind-independent entities with natures of roughly the same type as we ascribe to them. The extreme instrumentalist denial that the concept of truth applies to scientific theory (found in some logical positivists) did not survive Tarski's demonstration of the definability of truth for certain formal languages. But instrumentalistic views are common amongst philosophers influenced by the positivists or by pragmatism. W. V. O. Quine, for instance, draws a fairly sharp observation/theory distinction and denies there is any mind and theoryindependent distinction of fact not reflected in a difference in observational data. His views incline towards a relativism regarding truth for those theories compatible with, but transcending, the empirical facts. Similarly relativistic views on scientific truth can be found in many other influential philosophers (in the early writings of T. S. Kuhn, for instance) and are incompatible with the realist view of a mindindependent realm of facts against which theories can be measured absolutely for truth or falsity. As well as scientific realism, 'realism' is also currently used as a name for certain fallibilistic doctrines. The fallibilist about a certain class of beliefs holds that such beliefs, even if arrived at in optimal conditions for belief formation, can be wholly false. The linguistic turn of modern philosophy has led to fallibilism being interpreted as a semantic doctrine: that truth for sentences transcends the evidence for them. A tension thus emerges between the skepticism of fallibilism and the antiskepticism of the scientific realists (who often claim the semantic doctrine of fallibilism has little to do with traditional realism). Nonetheless the idea of mind-independence needs explicating—antirealists agree the world is independent of, for example, the will—and fallibilism offers one fairly clear way of doing so. On the other hand, traditional realism did not involve radical skepticism towards sentences such as 'there are physical objects,' the very reverse in fact. Even if the fallibilist evinces no actual doubt regarding this sentence but holds merely that our opinions and the truth on this matter might have come apart, realists with a naturalistic approach to cognition might demur. Conversely one might take a fallibilist view towards, say, mathematics while denying that it deals with mind-independent entities. A compromise is to characterize realism towards a class of entities as the view that some beliefs (typically linguistically expressed) about them are fallible. Antirealist fallibilism in mathematics then consists in denying that mathematics is about anything. Explicating just what 'aboutness' comes to, is the major difficulty with this proposal. Fallibilism is taken to be the key realist notion by philosophers skeptical of its truth such as Hilary Putnam and Michael Dummett. They agree of course that one is often wrong; that, for example, the objects one applies terms to in actual linguistic practice are often not those one ought to apply them to if one is to respect the objective content of the expression. But they insist objective content is rooted in our linguistic practices too. Empiricist views of sentence meaning— the meanings transmitted and learnt in languagelearning cannot transcend the empirical circumstances of the learning—then lead them to suggest the notion of truth is identified or replaced with epistemic notions such as verifiability or justified assertibility and to deny that beliefs arrived at in optimal circumstances can be false. Thus metaphysical doctrines such as realism are held to depend on theories from the philosophy of language. Critics of such views counter that they rest on poor epistemology. Skeptics about the notion of nondeductive justification will find the notion of justified assertibility dubious. And Chomskyans will charge the antifallibilists with a crude empiricist theory of the acquisition and transmission of linguistic meaning, holding by contrast that the empirical circumstances of language learning may act only as a catalyst activating a largely innate cognitive state of understanding which can transcend its experiential inputs. Even if the general negative arguments against realism fail, however, the task of establishing it as correct for particular cases, for example, for microphysical objects, quantum mechanical states, abstract objects, and so forth, is still a substantial and unrealized one. See also: Instrumentalism.
Bibliography Devitt M 1991 Realism and Truth. Blackwell, Oxford Dummett M 1978 Truth and Other Enigmas. Duckworth, London Kuhn T S 1970 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL Putnam H 1978 Meaning and the Moral Sciences. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London Quine W V O 1992 The Pursuit of Truth. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA

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Language, Metaphysics, and Ontology

Sortal Terms
E. J. Lowe

'Sortal terms' are a species of general term falling within the grammatical category of common or count nouns (or, more generally, count noun phrases). The adjective 'sortal' was apparently coined by John Locke, who used it to describe names for sorts or species of individual substances, and modern usage more or less agrees with this. Typical examples of sortal terms in English are horse, tree, and clock. Some sortal terms, like horse, denote natural kinds and others, like clock, denote artefactual kinds. Yet others denote abstract kinds, for example, the logico-mathematical sortal terms set and number.

different sets of identity-conditions, on pain of contradiction. 2. Classifications of Sortal Terms Sortal terms may be further subclassified in various ways. So far only syntactically simple sortal terms have been mentioned, but there are also syntactically complex ones, exemplified by such count noun phrases as white horse and tree which sheds its leaves in winter. Some sortal terms which are syntactically simple appear nonetheless to be semantically complex: for instance, mathematician is arguably semantically equivalent to something like person who studies mathematics, and is therefore governed by the same criterion of identity as governs the unqualified sortal term person (though whether or not the latter is in turn semantically complex is a matter for debate). Sortal terms like boy and tadpole are examples of what David Wiggins has called 'phased sortals,' because they characterize the items to which they apply only during one phase of their existence. It appears that many but not all phased sortals which are syntactically simple are semantically complex. For instance, boy is arguably analyzable as meaning young male human being but it is debatable whether tadpole is synonymous with immature frog with gills and a tail, for even if the latter two terms are necessarily coextensive this is not obviously something of which competent speakers of English have a priori knowledge. Sortal terms bear certain close affinities to mass terms like water and gold. Many terms in both classes are alike in designating natural kinds. But mass terms are unlike sortal terms in being dissective (gold is divisible into parts which are themselves gold, but the parts of a horse are not themselves horses) and in not supplying principles of enumeration for their instances. Thus, whereas it makes sense to ask how many horses, say, exist in a given region, it only makes sense to ask how much water or gold does. Even so, a mass term like gold clearly does have a criterion of identity governing its application, for it makes sense to ask whether the gold existing in a region at one time is the same gold as that existing there or elsewhere at another time. Where mass terms crucially differ from sortal terms, then, is in lacking criteria of individuation governing their application. There are however standard ways of creating complex sortal terms out of simple mass terms: for instance, drop of water and nugget of gold. It should also be noted that some general terms are ambiguous in that they admit both a sortal term and a mass term interpretation, as is

1. The Semantics of Sortal Terms A distinguishing semantic feature of sortal terms is that the application of any such term is typically governed by criteria of individuation and identity—principles determining the individuation and identityconditions of the particular items characterizable by that term. Thus a full grasp of the meaning of the term horse will involve an understanding of what makes for the individuality of any particular horse (how, for instance, the horse as a whole is related to its parts) and what defines the persistence of an individual horse over time. Possession of such an understanding is a necessary condition of a speaker's being able to identify, distinguish, and hence count individual horses. The question of how many individual items characterizable by a given sortal term exist subject to some further condition (for instance, how many horses exist in the UK today) is one which always makes sense, even if it cannot always be answered. It should be noted, however, that not all count nouns (nouns which form plurals and admit numerical adjectives) satisfy this condition, and hence that not all count nouns qualify as sortal terms. It makes no determinate sense, for instance, to ask how many things exist in a given room at a certain time, because the noun thing is not governed by any distinct criterion of identity. Such nouns are sometimes called 'dummy sortals.' It is important to realize too that not all sortal terms are governed by the same criterion of identity, a fact which Locke himself clearly appreciated. (Locke argues at length that the sortal terms man and person convey different identity conditions.) However, where the sorts denoted by two sortal terms are related as species to genus (as, for example, with horse and mammal), the terms in question must indeed be governed by the same criterion of identity, for one and the same individual may be characterizable by both such terms and such an individual cannot be subject to two

It is an undisputed fact that particulars have properties and stand in relations to other particulars. Those who believe in universals, the realists, analyze this fact by supposing that particulars are related to a distinct category of entity, universals, which are identified with properties and relations. Philosophers have suggested that universals offer solutions to a variety of linguistic and nonlinguistic problems. Historically, the primary problem is to give an account of the objective resemblances of particulars (the so-called 'problem of universals' or 'problem of the one over the many'). In metaphysical terms, how is it that distinct particulars can be of the same type? In linguistic terms, how is it that distinct particulars can be characterized by the same predicate? Realists explain sameness of type as the sharing of a universal by the particulars. Nominalists reject universals and so reject this explanation of sameness of type. 1. Realist Theories Realist theories differ along two dimensions. First, universals can be either transcendent or immanent (the scholastic distinction between universalia ante res and universalia in rebus). For example, Plato's Forms are often interpreted as transcendent universals. They inhabit a puzzling platonic heaven separate from the particulars that imitate or participate in them. Aristotle brought universals down to earth by denying that they can exist separately from and independently of the particulars that are related to them—universals are 'in' particulars. D. M. Armstrong (1989) has tried to cash out the metaphor of immanence. He argues that a 'thin' particular, say Socrates, is related to a universal, say wisdom, by a primitive relation of instantiation. The 'thick' particular, consisting of Socrates instantiating all his nonrelational universals, actually contains those universals. Universals are located in space and time but, mysteriously, they are wholly present wherever they are instantiated. The second dimension of difference between realist

theories concerns the abundance of universals. At the abundant extreme, a universal corresponds to each predicate. At the sparse extreme, universals are only admitted if they are required to characterize the objective resemblances and causal powers of particulars. On the sparse view, the relationship between predicates and universals is more complex. As Armstrong says, 'given a predicate, there may be none, one or many universals in virtue of which the predicate applies. Given a universal, there may be none, one or many predicates which apply in virtue of that universal' (Armstrong 1978, vol.2: 9). Armstrong's sparse and immanent theory of universals is motivated by empiricism. Universals exist in our space-time world and, by examining this world, science determines a posteriori what universals there are. 2. What Work Will Universal Do? In thought and language we pick out particulars and ascribe properties to them and relations between them. A realist theory of universals gives the ontological ground for this activity of predication. For example, the predicate 'is wise' applies to Socrates because he instantiates the universal wisdom. The predication relation is explained via the primitive relation of instantiation. One predicate can apply to many different particulars because each particular instantiates the universal that is the ontological correlate of the predicate. Socrates and Plato are both wise because each instantiates wisdom. So universals solve the linguistic form of the 'one over many' problem. But a sparse theory of universals cannot offer this solution because there is no guarantee that our predicates pick out the objective resemblances among particulars that science will discover—there might be no universal wisdom. Hence, Armstrong offers his sparse theory as a solution to the metaphysical version of the 'one over many' problem. The objective resemblances between particulars (which may or may not be picked
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Language, Metaphysics, and Ontology out by our ordinary language predicates) sort them into types. Particulars of the same type, say being 1 kilogram in mass, literally have something in common, the universal 1 kilogram in mass, which grounds the resemblance. 3. A Nominalist Response David Lewis (1983) rejects Armstrong's universals. Lewis suggests that properties are classes of actual and possible particulars. Predication is analyzed by the primitive relation of class-membership—to have a property is just to be a member of a class. Since every class of particulars is a property, properties are even more abundant than predicates. Such indiscriminate properties cannot ground the objective resemblances of particulars. But Lewis suggests classes can be ordered on a scale of naturalness. The perfectly natural classes are those which contain particulars of the same type. Unlike Armstrong, Lewis does not attempt to analyze the facts of resemblance but rather takes these facts as primitive. So Armstrong and Lewis both do justice to the facts of resemblance by having a sparse conception of properties. But because Armstrong does not tie universals to language, he cannot easily employ universals in giving that language a semantics. Lewis, on the other hand, also has an abundant conception of properties that can supply ready-made semantic values for predicates—to each predicate there corresponds the class of actual and possible particulars that satisfy the predicate. Indeed, such classes can function as the semantic values for other linguistic categories as well. For example, red is a color employs 'red' as an abstract singular term. It is extremely difficult to paraphrase this sentence so that the apparent reference to a property disappears. But it is also implausible to suppose that 'red' stands for a universal (on Armstrong's sparse theory). So Lewis suggests that 'red' stands for the class of red particulars. Such classes also prove to be the best candidates for the values of the variables of second-order quantifiers as in some zoological species are cross-fertile. 4. Future Work There can be no doubt that both sparse and abundant conceptions of properties and relations are required. A semantics for natural language will require an abundant conception, whereas work in metaphysics suggests that the sparse conception can do much more besides accounting for sameness of type among particulars. The compulsory and widely contested question is how one should characterize these two conceptions and their relationship to one another. It should be mentioned that a theory of tropes, or abstract particulars, is receiving increasing attention as a viable alternative to both Armstrong's realism and Lewis's class-nominalism. See also: Nominalism; Ontology; Realism. Bibliography
Armstrong D M 1978 Universals and Scientific Realism, 2 vols. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Armstrong D M 1989 Universals: An Opinionated Introduction. Westview Press, Boulder, CO Campbell K 1990 Abstract Particulars. Blackwell, Oxford Lewis D K 1983 New work for a theory of universals. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 61: 343-77 Loux M J 1976 The existence of universals. In: Loux M J (ed.) Universals and Particulars: Readings in Ontology, rev. edn. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, IN Mellor D H Oliver A D (eds.) 1997 Properties. Oxford University Press, Oxford Oliver A D 1996 The metaphysics of properties. Mind 105: 1-8.

Verificationism
S. Shalkowski

Verificationism is the latter-day incarnation of classical empiricism. In keeping with the classical empiricist tradition formulated by Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, verificationists give a preeminent place to experience in the acquisition of knowledge. During the nineteenth century, while idealism was prevalent in Germany and Britain, Vienna became a center for European empiricism. This Viennese tradition continued into the twentieth century and took a very clear and influential form in the 1920s with the formation of the Vienna
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Circle and the development of the set of philosophical ideas that became known as 'logical positivism.' Influenced by the anti-metaphysical positions of the scientifically inclined Ernst Mach and Henri Poincare, the Vienna Circle opposed the apparently extravagant metaphysical claims of German and British idealism which seemed to be based on an allegedly suprascientific access to truth. Thinkers in the Vienna Circle rejected both idealist metaphysics and the possibility of any nonscientific method for acquiring

Verificationism knowledge, making a sharp distinction between metaphysics and science. 1. Cognitive Significance The fundamental problem for these opponents of idealism was how to separate assertions that are worthy of our attention from those that are not. What principled basis could they give for declaring 'Jupiter has natural satellites' acceptable, but The Absolute is active' not? They sought the answer to this question by focusing on the general problem of meaning or cognitive significance. The question of how to separate science from unacceptable metaphysics depended on an answer to the question of when a statement is meaningful or cognitively significant. In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein maintained that the claims of metaphysics are nonsense and that the only propositions which are sayable are those of natural science. Subsequently, empiricists tried to identify two different ways in which cognitive significance can be attained. Analytic statements are meaningful because their truth depends on the accepted conventions about how to use words. So 'All bachelors are unmarried' was said to be meaningful because it is true in virtue of the way words like 'bachelor' and 'unmarried' are used in English. Analytic truths can be thought of as following from the truths of logic together with certain linguistic conventions (what Carnap called 'meaning postulates'). If all of mathematics could be reduced to logic, its truths, central as they are to the sciences, would belong to the category of the meaningful. All other statements are meaningful, according to the 'verifiability principle,' only insofar as they are in principle capable of being verified by (actual or possible) experience. The trouble with 'The Absolute is active' is that there is no set of observations that could, even in principle, establish its truth. 2. The Verifiability Principle The verifiability principle provided verificationism with both a theory of meaning and a solution to what Karl Popper called the 'problem of demarcation,' the problem of how to separate science from nonscience. For verificationists, the separation of science from nonscience coincided with the separation of sense from nonsense. As well as metaphysics, much of what had traditionally been part of epistemology, ethics, and other branches of philosophy, was now said to consist of nonscientific, meaningless claims. Constructions like 'Murder is wrong,' may have an emotive content, but are, at best, pseudostatements devoid of factual meaning. Early formulations of the verifiability principle restricted meaningfulness to statements capable of conclusive verification. Under this formulation, the principle entails that a nonanalytic statement is meaningful if and only if some set of basic observation statements entail (and are entailed by) the statement in question. This formulation of the principle, however, was too restrictive to serve the verificationists' purposes. In particular, this formulation renders all universal laws of science nonscientific and meaningless. No unrestricted universal statement can be conclusively established on the basis of a limited number of observations alone. Since verifiability was intended to legitimize science, as well as condemn metaphysics, emasculating science by declaring all scientific laws to be nonsense was unacceptable. In Language, Truth and Logic, A. J. Ayer weakened the principle to make verifiability equivalent to confirmability. This meant that a nonanalytic statement is meaningful just in case it is possible that there be some evidence that counts in favor of the truth of that statement. On Ayer's account, an empirically meaningful statement is one that can be conjoined with suitable auxiliary hypotheses to derive observational consequences that are not derivable from the auxiliary hypotheses alone. While this weaker criterion of empirical meaning gives the verdict that scientific laws are empirically meaningful, it also gives the verdict that 'The Absolute is active' is meaningful because we can take 'If the Absolute is active, then Rover is brown' as an auxiliary hypothesis and with the two of these statements derive 'Rover is brown,' which is entailed by neither the statement in question nor the auxiliary hypothesis alone. A further attempt was to suggest that all empirically meaningful statements can be reduced to statements in a suitably restricted language whose primitive predicates all designate only characteristics of immediate experience. Other variations on the theme of formulating an acceptable criterion of meaningfulness in terms of verifiability were proposed, but each had the weakness of either excluding too much or too little from the realm of the meaningful. 3. Falsifiability According to Karl Popper, theories like astrology are defective not because they are not amenable to confirmation but because they are too confirmable. No matter what happens, pseudoscientific claims are compatible with the outcome. Astrology is pseudoscientific precisely because it is confirmed by everything and falsifiable by nothing. In contrast, Einstein's theory of relativity makes risky predictions that could turn out to be incorrect. Thus, Popper suggested that the hallmark of science is not any form of verifiability, butfalsifiability. For him, the issue of separating science from pseudoscience and the issue of separating sense from nonsense were independent issues, the former being a genuine philosophical problem while the latter is a typical philosophical pseudoproblem. Popper was concerned only with the line of demarcation between science and pseudoscience. His critiques of the general confirmationist or inductivist

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Language, Metaphysics, and Ontology approaches to science were misconstrued as alternative proposals about meaning and many of his criticisms were unheeded for several decades.
4. Verificationism and Semantic Theory

Verificationism is still a prevalent doctrine in semantic theory. Verificationism in semantic theory is the doctrine that the meaning of a statement is at least partially a function of the evidence one has for that statement. Michael Dummett's verificationist semantics, sometimes called semantic antirealism, claims that the meaning of a statement is the conditions under which a speaker has sufficient justification for asserting it. However, Dummett's project is not to distinguish science from pseudoscience or sense from nonsense. Rather, it is to account for linguistic knowledge. If language is to be learnable, he argues, meanings are things to which speakers will have sufficient access in order to associate those meanings with the appropriate statements. By contrast, truthconditional semantics allows that statements may be true (or false) even though those who understand them may be in principle incapable of recognizing this. Thus, contemporary verificationists explicate semantic properties in terms of epistemological properties. For them, the theory of meaning is just the theory of linguistic understanding; and meanings are not entities, but structured practices of competent speakers of a language. In ways that earlier verificationists did not fully appreciate, verificationist (antirealist) semantics has implications for the proper form of logical theory, and for acceptable metaphysical theses. If statements do not have truth conditions that transcend verification, then to assert a statement is equivalent not to the assertion that the statement is true, but to the assertion that the statement is justified. The assertion that p is equivalent to the assertion that 'p' is justified. It follows that the assertion that ~p is equivalent to the assertion that '~p' is justified. Consider now the classical law of excluded middle, which says that every instance of 'p v ~p' is true. If verificationist semantics is adopted, this reduces to the claim that it is

always true that either 'p' is justified or else ' ~ p' is justified. But, there are many statements we have neither sufficient reason to assert nor sufficient reason to deny. For them, the proper action is refusal either to assert or deny. Accordingly, excluded middle is rejected by contemporary antirealists along with the classical logic in which this law is embedded. It is widely recognized that a thoroughgoing empiricist semantics requires a radical rethinking of the nature of valid inference. If truth is thought to be closely associated with warranted assertibility, then the semantic principle of bivalence, that every statement is either true or false, must also be rejected by the verificationist for parallel reasons. Verificationism has parallel consequences for metaphysics. If some statements are neither true nor false, and truth requires metaphysical truthmakers (be they cognizer-independent facts or cognizer-dependent epistemic conditions), then—as it were—the world has metaphysical gaps. Suppose 'p' is such a statement. There is no truthmaker for 'p' and there is no truthmaker for ' ~ p' (there is no fact of the matter). Far from Verificationism laying all metaphysical claims to rest, it appears to carry with it its own metaphysical commitments. See also: Analyticity; Meaning Postulate; Falsificationism; Intuitionism; Logical Positivism; Realism.
Bibliography Ayer A J 1936 Language, Truth and Logic. Gollancz, London Ayer A J (ed.) 1959 Logical Positivism. Free Press, Glencoe Carnap R 1967 (trans. George R A) The Logical Structure of the World [and] Pseudoproblems in Philosophy, 2nd edn. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London Dummett M 1978 Truth and Other Enigmas. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Hempel C 1950 Problems and changes in the empiricist criterion of meaning. Revue Internationale de Philosophic 4: 41-63 Popper K 1959 (trans. Popper K.) The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Hutchinson, London Quine W V O 1951 Two dogmas of empiricism. Philosophical Review 60: 2<M3

The second half of the twentieth century has seen a great surge of interest both in language and in apes. With regard to language, the questions have been focused upon the pattern and process whereby it is acquired by children and whether its roots are in genetics or in learning. With regard to apes, the questions focused upon evolution and the genetic relatedness of apes to the early hominoids and humans. The intensity of debates on both topics has been substantial and sustained. It should come as no surprise, then, that the question, 'Can apes acquire language?' also gives rise to great controversy. After all, to answer that question presumes that one can define 'language.' Language, along with all other similar concepts, can be defined—but not to everyone's satisfaction. Is speech, for example, a requisite to language? What constitutes a natural, versus an artificial language? Also, one might even object to that question by declaring, 'If, as many hold to be the case, language is a distinguishing attribute of our species, apes cannot possibly acquire it!' Nevertheless, within this confusion matrix, a number of investigators did launch research programs to answer the question, 'Can apes acquire language?' Why might the ape be expected to acquire language? The answer is, of course, that they are very closely related to us. Chimpanzees, for example, are more closely related to us than they are to gorillas. Humans share 99 percent of genetic material with these apes (Andrews and Martin 1987), and human lineage diverged from theirs only 4-6 million years ago (Sibley and Ahlquist 1984).
1. Early Attempts to Teach Language

Since neural limitations and the anatomy of the vocal tract prevent the ape from producing sounds necessary for human speech (Lieberman 1968), alternative modes for communication have been sought. The 1960s witnessed the beginnings of two important chimpanzee projects, each with a unique approach to communication: one by Beatrix and Alan Gardner of the University of Nevada and another by

David Premack at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The Gardners used a manual sign language, the American Sign Language for the Deaf, as their medium for establishing 'two-way communication' with a chimpanzee. They believed that their chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes), Washoe, would be competent to make such signs and that she would be acquiring a 'natural' language as she did so. Premack used plastic tokens to stand for words with his chimpanzee, Sarah. His method employed an artificial language system. Despite different methods and goals, both Washoe and Sarah learned to use their signs and tokens and impressed many with their accomplishments. The 1970s saw the launching of the LAN A Project by Rumbaugh and his associates of Georgia State University, the University of Georgia, and the Yerkes Primate Center of Emory University. Unique to the LANA Project was the introduction of a computermonitored keyboard, with each key having a distinctive geometric pattern called a 'lexigram.' Instead of letters, each lexigram key on the chimpanzee Lana's keyboard was meant to serve as a whole word. The priority goal of the LANA Project was to determine whether a computer-controlled language-training system might be perfected to advance research where learning and language abilities were limited, either due to genetics (i.e., apes, whose brains are one-third the size of the human brain) or brain damage (i.e., children with mental retardation). Development of the computer-controlled system succeeded beyond expectations. That system also was a prototype for portable language-communication keyboards that are now commercially manufactured and in wide use by children with mental retardation (Romski and Sevcik 1992). Through such keyboards, many retarded children are able to communicate and thus participate in the world as they have not been able to do in the past. The 1970s also saw Terrace's Project Nim (Nim was a chimpanzee) launched at Columbia University and Miles's Project Chantek (Chantek was an orangutan, of the genus Pongo) at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga. Also, Fouts led his own project, first
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Language and Mind at the University of Oklahoma and then at Central Washington College. All three of these projects used manual signing based on the American Sign Language for the Deaf. Primarily through use of various modes of trial-and-error teaching methods entailing molding of the ape's hand, young chimpanzees learned at least when to make a given manual sign or gesture in relation to each of a variety of exemplars and events (Fouts 1972). Whether the apes knew what they were signing was, at that time, not recognized as a central question. The emphasis was upon production, i.e., the use of signs by the apes. In retrospect, all of the foregoing projects shared a common error. All project leaders naively assumed that, if an ape appropriately produce a sign, that it would also comprehend or understand that sign when used by other social agents. Since 1980, however, it has been learned that the skills of production do not by themselves warrant the conclusion that understanding, by the user, is in place. In 1992 data and arguments also strongly support the conclusion that it is comprehension or understanding that is the critical ingredient for language, not the ability to produce signs, or to make specific sounds. As discussed below, language understanding can be instated in chimpanzees by rearing them from birth much as human children are reared—in an environment where language is used to announce and to coordinate social activities (Savage-Rumbaugh, et al. 1993). A review of research, enabled by the computermonitored lexigram keyboard that has led to our present-day understanding of language and the processes whereby apes can acquire it, is in order. 1.2 The LAN A Project Research with Lana was designed so that she could exercise substantial control over her environment and life through use of her keyboard. On that keyboard, each key was embossed with a distinctive geometric symbol, called a lexigram. Each lexigram was intended to function as a word, just as words generally do in our vocabularies. The first symbolic communications learned by Lana were 'stock' sentences, i.e., they were specific sentences which had to be used by her in order to activate a variety of devices controlled by the computer. The software program in the computer specified certain relationships between words that had to be honored if Lana's multilexigram productions were to have any effect. Examples of stock sentences were, 'Please machine give milk,' 'Please machine make window open,' 'Please machine give piece of apple (or bread, banana, etc.),' and so on. Lana's use of stock sentences availed to her a variety of foods and drinks, music, slides, movies, a view out of the window, and so on. In addition, two-way symbolic communication between Lana and her caretakers became possible at least to the extent that specific
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kinds of tests could be conducted to determine her skills of naming objects and their colors (e.g., 'What name-of this that's blue [or red, orange, green, black, etc.]?,' 'What color of this box [or ball, cup, shoe, etc.?]'). Lana demonstrated that an ape could learn to use more than 200 lexigram symbols, either singly or in stock sentences, with relatively high levels of accuracy. Lana also made interesting modifications in several portions of her stock sentences and phrases in a manner that suggested insight on her part that such could be used to achieve special purposes. For example, a cucumber was asked for as 'the banana which is green,' an orange-colored commercial soft drink was asked for as the 'Coke which is orange,' and a whole orange (i.e., fruit) was called the 'apple which is orange (color)' and the 'ball which is orange.' She also modified several stock sentences (Rumbaugh 1977) so as to achieve unique communications with caretakers. For example, Lana readily modified her stock sentence, 'Please machine give coffee,' to 'You give coffee to Lana,' and 'You give this which is black,' in contexts where the well-mastered stock sentence, for various reasons, failed to net her a cup of coffee (e.g., where people, and not the machine, had the coffee). Lana also learned to differentiate valid versus invalid stems or beginnings of stock sentences that were up to five lexigrams long. Given a valid stem, constructed by the experimenter, she would complete it appropriately. For example, if the experimenter gave Lana the sentence stem, 'Please machine...,' Lana could add,'... give Coke,''... give piece of banana,' and so on. Given an invalid stem, such as 'Machine please...,' or 'Please give machine of piece...,' rather than 'Please machine,' or 'Please machine give piece of...,' she would erase it rather than waste effort with it. (She erased it through use of the 'period' key, which served to clear the incorrect stem from the keyboard. She learned early on, and by herself, to use the period key to erase her own errors of production.) In this and other ways, Lana exhibited competence with the grammar of her language system, a grammar which had to be complied with if her requests were to be 'honored' by the computer that monitored her productions and that controlled the activation of the incentive-vending devices of her room. After five years of training, Lana could produce sentences with up to 11 lexigrams in length. However, in the final analysis, Lana failed to show skills of comprehension that one would expect of her, given her impressive skills of 'production.' Simply learning associations between lexigrams and exemplars and learning rudimentary rules of grammar were not sufficient to produce a competence commensurate with a young child's language development, which reflects a far greater degree of understanding language. Consequently, an additional program of research that focused upon pragmatics and semantics or language understanding was begun.

Apes and Language 1.3 Sherman and Austin Beginning in 1975, two other chimpanzees, Sherman and Austin, were taught to use the lexigram keyboard in settings that emphasized communication between them. A clear requisite for competent communication between Sherman and Austin to be achieved was the ability to comprehend the meanings of lexigrams. To cultivate comprehension, the chimpanzees learned that they both had to share specific information and to act upon that information. For example, prized foods and drinks (e.g., referents of lexigrams) were placed in sealed containers, hence not necessarily immediately present and directly observable. Because, on any given trial, only one of the two chimpanzees saw, and hence knew, the specific food or drink that was placed in the container and because neither could receive the food unless both asked for it properly, the onus was upon the first chimpanzee to communicate the contents of the container to the second one. If the second chimpanzee comprehended the communication and properly requested the item which it had not seen, the food was shared between them. Otherwise, the palatable incentive was withheld. Thus, the need to communicate was instated. More importantly, when their keyboard was taken away, the chimpanzees demonstrated that they had learned the importance of communication as well as how representational symbol systems work. This they demonstrated by inventing their own symbol system. With no lexigrams available, they used manufacturers' brand names and labels (M&M, Coke, etc.) to tell one another the identity of the hidden food. In these and a variety of other contexts, experiences served to encourage learning that the use of symbols enabled communication 'about' things, rather than that their use was just a ritual of responses necessary to access 'things.' Through many other additional communication paradigms that stressed the use of symbols to refer to things removed in space and time, Sherman and Austin became highly competent in labeling (i.e., naming) items, requesting items, complying with the requests of others, and most importantly in understanding language symbols (see SavageRumbaugh 1986). The communicative value of language for Sherman and Austin served to cultivate comprehension and generated other untaught, unanticipated uses of their word lexigrams. Sherman and Austin became the first chimpanzees to systematically communicate their wishes and desires to one another through the use of printed symbols. They learned to take turns, to exchange roles as speaker and listener, and to coordinate their communicating activities. Once they had learned the referential value of symbols, they began to use the keyboard to announce their intended actions: what it was they were going to do (e.g., tickle, chase, play-bite, or to set about getting a specific food or drink from a refrigerator in another room). Sherman and Austin also demonstrated impressive symbol-based, cross-modal matching abilities (e.g., to equate the 'feel' of objects via touch to lexigrams and vice versa). Without specific training to do so, they were able to look at a lexigram symbol and then reach into a covered box and select the appropriate object on the basis of tactual cues alone. They could also feel or palpate an object not in view, and state the name of that object. The most important demonstration that lexigrams were meaningful symbols to Sherman and Austin was achieved in a study where they, first, learned about the categories of 'food' and 'tool,' and then, second, appropriately classified lexigrams of their vocabularies using those categories. Initially, only three foods and three tools were used to introduce the concept of 'categories' to them. Each chimpanzee was taught to label three edible items as 'foods' and three implements as 'tools.' They were then shown other food and implements to see if they could generalize the categorical concepts to things that had not been used during training. They could. Then they were shown the word-lexigram symbols for a variety of foods and implements and asked whether or not each word symbol (e.g., banana, straw, cheese, magnet, corn chips, etc.) stood for a food or a tool. They were able to label these word lexigrams as foodwords or tool-words the first time they were asked and did so without specific training. Thus, they revealed an understanding of the fact that word symbols stood for things. They also knew the specific things each symbol stood for—otherwise they could not have called the word lexigram for 'corn,' a food and the word lexigram for '(drinking) straw,' a tool; for it was not the word lexigrams themselves that were food or tools, but rather the things they stood for that enabled them to categorize them correctly. Such skills left little doubt but that for Sherman and Austin their lexigrams served as representations of things not necessarily present and that they had mastered the essence of semantics (e.g., symbol or word meaning). 2. Later Studies with Pan paniscus All of the chimpanzees discussed to this point were so-called 'common' chimpanzees of the genus and species, Pan troglodytes. There is a second major species of chimpanzee that has been erroneously called the 'pygmy' chimpanzee. It is now clear that this second species is not a pygmoid version of another form, and it is now by preference called the bonobo (Pan paniscus). Bonobos are even rarer and more endangered than the common chimpanzee and they more closely resemble humans. Bonobos frequently walk upright more readily and competently than P. troglodytes. Also, they use eye contact to initiate joint attention, iconic gestures to entice others to assume physical orientations and actions, and use vocal com49

Language and Mind munication with greater frequency than does the common chimpanzee. They also tend to be more affiliative. Both the bonobo and common chimpanzee maintain strong social, though somewhat unique, bonds within their group. Matata, a wild-bora female that dwelled in the forest until an estimated age of six years, was the first bonobo introduced to the lexigram system. Methods that had proved successful with both Sherman and Austin in the majority failed with Matata. At best, Matata learned only eight lexigrams and, then, only how to use them to request that things be given to her. Even after years of effort, Matata failed to use even these few lexigrams reliably and gave no evidence that any of them functioned as symbolic representations of their individual referents. Nevertheless, Matata otherwise appeared to be a very bright chimpanzee. During her lexigram training, Matata had her adopted son, Kanzi, with her. No systematic effort was made to teach Kanzi lexigrams while work with Matata was underway. He was always present, however, whenever Matata was worked with. Consequently, he always had the unintended opportunity to observe her training. When Kanzi was two and a half years old, he was separated from Matata when she was taken to another site to be bred. Only then did it become obvious that something unexpected had happened. Kanzi had learned the symbols that experimenters had been attempting to teach Matata. He needed no special training to use symbols to request that things be given to him, to name things, or even to announce what he was about to do. As a consequence, a significant change was made in research tactics. Structured training protocols were terminated, and Kanzi was introduced to a life in which throughout his waking hours he was part of a social scene. People talked in English to Kanzi and touched the appropriate lexigrams on his keyboard whenever they coincided with words of spoken utterances. Through continued observation of others' use of language Kanzi also learned language and its functions in the real world. Kanzi was encouraged to listen to speech and to observe others; however, he was never denied objects or participation in activities if he did not use his keyboard. Caregivers used the keyboard to comment on events (present, future, and past), to communicate with each other concerning their intentions or needs, and, in particular, to talk about any thing that appeared to be of interest to Kanzi. Kanzi quickly learned to ask to travel to several of the named sites throughout 55 acres of forested land that surrounds the laboratory. He learned to ask to play a number of games, to visit other chimps, to get and/or prepare and even cook any number of specific foods, and to watch television. Kanzi's lexigram vocabulary increased to 149 words by the time he was
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five and a half years old. It was only a short time before it was also noted that, in contrast to Lana, Sherman, Austin, and Matata, Kanzi appeared to be comprehending human speech—not just single words, but sentences as well. As a consequence, an experiment was undertaken to assess Kanzi's speech comprehension and to compare it with that of a human child, Alia (SavageRumbaugh, et al. 1993). Under controlled conditions, designed to preclude inadvertent cueing as to what should be done, both Kanzi and Alia were given 660 novel sentences which requested them to do a variety of unusual things. For example, they were asked to take a specific object to a stated location or person ('Take the gorilla [doll] to the bedroom'; 'Give Rose a carrot'), to do something to an object ('Hammer the snake!'), to do something with a specific object relative to another object ('Put a rubber band on your ball'), to go somewhere and retrieve a specific object ('Get the telephone that's outdoors'), and so on. An everchanging and wide variety of objects was present, and the subjects were asked to act upon members of each array in a variety of ways. This practice ensured that 'compliance with a request' was not simply a result of a given subject doing whatever was obvious on a given trial. Thus, when asked to 'Get the melon that's in the potty,' a second melon was on the floor—even in Kanzi's path to the potty; and when asked to 'Get the lettuce that's in the microwave (oven),' Kanzi found not only lettuce, but a variety of other things in the oven as well. At the time of the study, Alia was two and a half years old and Kanzi was about nine years old. Interestingly, Kanzi's comprehension of novel spoken sentences was quite comparable to Alia's. Both subjects were about 70 percent correct in carrying out the sentences of novel requests on their first presentation. By the time Kanzi was eight years old, his productive competence of lexigrams with gestures was comparable to an 18-month-old child. His lexigram vocabulary consisted of well over 250; his comprehension of spoken English was commensurate with that of a two and a half-year-old child. Kanzi was the first ape that had acquired language skills without formal training programs. He developed language by observing and by living. The pattern whereby he did so paralleled that of the normal human child who, first, comes to comprehend the speech of others and then subsequently talks. Was Kanzi an exceptional bonobo? Or, could his skills of comprehension be replicated with other chimpanzees? To answer this question, Kanzi's younger sister, Mulika, was exposed to the same kind of linguistic environment that Kanzi had, but was introduced to it at a much earlier age. She, too, first developed comprehension of spoken English and lexigrams as used by others and then began to use them productively.

Apes and Language At the age of about 18 months, although Mulika could use only seven or eight lexigrams with competence, tests revealed that she understood 70 others! 2.2 Interspecies Comparisons Was the ability to comprehend spoken English a particular characteristic of bonobos or, given rearing from birth in a language-saturated environment, would the common chimpanzee exhibit similar competency? An answer to this important question was sought in a study that involved corearing the two species of Pan, P. paniscus and P. troglodytes, so as to give them the same early exposure to spoken English and social communicative use of the lexigram keyboard. The two subjects selected were Panbanisha, a bonobo, and Panzee, a common chimpanzee. Their ages differed by only six weeks at the beginning of the study. From shortly after their births, for the next four years these two chimpanzees were uniformly provided with an enriched environment that emphasized communication as did Kanzi's. The experimenters expected that, under the conditions of their rearing that lacked all formal training, only the bonobo would come to comprehend English and use the keyboard. Initial results, up until the subjects were about two years old, supported that expectation. Notwithstanding, the common chimpanzee also evidenced significant, though lesser competence in both speech comprehension and in the spontaneous learning of the lexigrams and their meanings. She understood words and used her keyboard to communicate, thus revealing that environment was the critical ingredient in the spontaneous emergence of language skills in the chimpanzee as well as in the bonobo. On the other hand, the bonobo infant, Panbanisha, was substantially ahead of the common chimpanzee infant, Panzee, in all criteria. This observation, coupled with the extraordinarily limited speech comprehension skills of our four other common chimpanzees, discussed above, strongly suggests that the bonobo has a unique proclivity for benefiting in language acquisition if reared from birth in a language-saturated environment.
3. Important Factors in Language Acquisition—What Can be Concluded from these Studies?

Kanzi, Mulika, Panbanisha, and Panzee learned language without the typical trial-based learning paradigm involving reward-based contingencies. Given the appropriate environment from shortly after birth and continuing for several years, an ape can acquire linguistic skills without contingent reinforcement in formal trial-by-trial training. (All other apes before them—Sherman, Austin, and Lana—required formal training designed to cultivate various language functions.) Normal human children do not require formal training to learn language. Most certainly, the fact that most children experience a communicative

environment from the moment they are born is critical to the acquisition of language. Research with apes supports the view that a sensitive period exists for language acquisition (Greenough, et al. 1987): exposure to language during this period is necessary for the activation and further development of cognitive structures supported by specific brain circuitry. Kanzi's mother, Matata, was an adolescent when first given language training, training from which she could not significantly benefit. Her language competence was negligible when compared to that of Kanzi and Panbanisha's who were given very rich language environments within which to develop from shortly after birth. Similarly, Lana, Sherman, and Austin were between 18 months and two years old when their language training began. They were, by comparison, minimally able to comprehend human speech or to learn the meanings of lexigrams spontaneously. These observations suggest that it is during the first few months of life that exposure to language, including speech, is important if the continued development of language is to be optimal. Germane to the support of this point are observations on Tamuli, another bonobo; at the age of three years she was given the same experiences as Kanzi and Panbanisha's for seven months to see if she could acquire a vocabulary of lexigrams and come to comprehend spoken English. Tamuli failed to benefit other than minimally from that experience. Her lack of progress is consistent with the view that it is early within the first year of life that the sensitive time occurs for exposure to language to impact optimally upon brain and cognitive structures. The competence for language is laid postnatally, if not prenatally, and during early infancy—not in the school's classroom. If exposure to language is sufficiently early, no training is needed for chimpanzees and bonobos to begin to understand speech and that symbols represent things and ideas. They will spontaneously begin to communicate under these conditions if provided with a keyboard. If exposure to language occurs after infancy, once the apes have already reached the juvenile period, language skills can be inculcated through training but they do not appear spontaneously. In addition, even with training, the speech comprehension skills of such apes remain extremely limited. If exposure to language occurs at adolescence or later, even training appears to be insufficient to inculcate functional, representational language skills in the ape. Of course, better training techniques could be discovered in the future which would make it possible even for these apes to learn language. In humans, and now in apes as well, language acquisition entails, first, comprehension. Comprehension develops long before the speech musculature has matured enough for vocal control permitting language production in the child (Golinkoff, et al. 1987). It is now known that human children, raised from birth with the keyboards, use the lexigrams both to
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The lexigram keyboard appears to help structure the linguistic information as it is presented. Because the ape's attention is brought to the lexigram symbol simultaneously as it hears the spoken word, it appears to be better able to parse out spoken words from the soundstream that otherwise characterizes the hearing of a spoken sentence. In turn, this parsing probably serves to enhance the learning of individual word meanings. Speech coupled with corresponding use of lexigrams appears to facilitate the encoding of words and word meaning. As children with severe language deficiencies acquire competence in the use of these keyboards, they become more sociable at home and in the school and enjoy enhancement of interactions with normal peers. Their competence in using their boards extends to the real world, as per ordering food in restaurants and in work. Use of the keyboards also serves to stimulate the children's effort to speak, apparently in response to hearing the speech sounds which are under their control when the keyboard is used.
5. Summary

By studying apes, a great deal has been learned about language and how early environment serves from birth to support its acquisition. The work has enabled symbolic language skills to be acquired by children with language deficits due to mental retardation. In due course, studies of language acquisition will help us to understand better how language evolved and how our early ancestors may have used it to communicate.
Bibliography Andrews P, Martin L 1987 Cladistic relationships of extant and fossil hominoids. Journal of Human Evolution 16:10108

Innate Ideas
C. Travis

The ancient idea of innate ideas was later given new life and substance first by Descartes, then by Leibniz. Since Leibniz, innate ideas have come in two strengths.

Some are ideas or concepts that could not have been acquired through experience, or simply were not so acquired. This is the weaker strength. The others,

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Innate Ideas more potent ideas, are innate because, were they not already in place, experience would have nothing to teach us, or there would be nothing that we could learn, at least within some wide domain. For example, Leibniz thought that certain logical ideas—in effect, those of truth and identity—were of this type. in 'such-and-such' a way. Again, one answer to what forces us is supplied by innate ideas.
2. Chomsky's Conception of Innate Ideas

The idea of innate ideas has been used in the twentieth century by Noam Chomsky. Like Leibniz, his main concern is with a specific competence; in Chomsky's case a linguistic, or syntactic, one. The idea is that one 1. The Traditional Problems: Descartes and Leibniz could not learn a language without being innately Descartes's appeal to innate ideas stemmed from the constituted to learn (by natural means) a specific type following kinds of considerations. No-one has ever of language as opposed to others. The type is chardrawn or seen a perfect triangle. Rather, what we acterized by a certain set of principles, which, since confront are at best only approximations to that ideal, they fix what humans are constituted to learn, are which raises the question of why we detect that par- universal in human languages. At least for a time, ticular pattern in the samples where we do, or why we Chomsky characterized this innate constitution, in view them as approximations to that ideal or indeed one way among others, by ascribing knowledge of to anything. Experience does not teach us to choose these principles to the language learner. By the Lockethat ideal, so the idea of a triangle is not acquired, Leibniz principle, knowledge of principles requires the which means it must be innate (weaker strength). conceptual resources for formulating them. Hence, Moreover, it takes the right constitution to see tri- Chomsky concluded, we have innate grammatical angles where something quite nontriangular occurs in ideas. the brain. Chomskyan innate ideas may be seen as modified By contrast, Leibniz's problems were of this nature: Leibnizian ones—modified enough to make their exis'If I do not know already that no contradiction is true, tence a partly empirical question. It is not that the then how can experience teach me, say, that a hawk particular innate grammatical ideas that he would is not a handsaw?' Granted, hawks fly, and handsaws posit could not conceivably have been acquired, as do not. But perhaps that just means: hawks/handsaws with the ideas of truth and identity. Those gramfly and do not. If Leibniz is right about the problem matical ideas could have been acquired, had we had and its solution, then there are innate ideas in the suitable others to start with. But we must start somestronger sense. where, with some innate ideas. The form of the claim Leibniz and his main opponent, Locke, agreed that is: in fact, we started here. Similarly, it is not inconthe key issue was not over innate ideas, but rather ceivable that we should have learned some language over innate principles, i.e., knowledge that such-and- without the specific grammatical principles that we such. What one needed to know to learn about hawks are supposed to know innately. We might have had and handsaws was that no contradiction is true. But innate knowledge of different principles. We would Leibniz and Locke also agreed that there can be no then have learned languages of different forms— knowledge that without the conceptual resources for different, that is, from those that are humanly possformulating it. To know that no contradiction is true, ible. What is not an empirical thesis is that learning one needs the idea of truth. Perhaps in having the language requires innate knowledge of grammatical latter, one just does know the former. principles. What is empirical is that we satisfy that Innate ideas thus played a role in a theory of innate requirement by knowing thus and so innately. logical competence, which was their most important application from the seventeenth to the twentieth cen- 3. The Idea of Idea' turies. Some have thought logical competence, in The 'innate ideas' debate in the seventeenth and eightLeibniz's sense, bogus. Their idea, in brief, is that eenth centuries was deformed through entanglement the reason why any rational animal knows that no with the 'idea' idea, from which it has not yet comcontradictions are true is that we could not recognize pletely disentangled itself. With that thesis, having an any animal as rational without crediting it with that idea or a concept (of, say, licorice or a pentagon) knowledge. In seeing someone as rational, we must consists in having a representation accessible to direct do him the further courtesy of seeing him as logical to conscious inspection, and exhaustively specified by that extent. We are forced so to interpret him. The what one thus inspects; one starts having an idea sim'competence' is thus all in the eye of the beholder; ultaneously with the onset of this awareness. To it points to no specific psychologically real internal Locke, that notion made it seem much easier than it organization. Even if this view were plausible (i.e., the in fact is to show that there are no innate ideas: for logically competent reliably perform in quite concrete every such representation, there must be an onset of ways, which leaves room for that performance to be awareness of it. If not, then we do not inspect it 'in explained by something), it just pushes the problem consciousness,' so it does not determine the having of to a new domain. We are forced to see rational animals an idea at all.
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Language and Mind This 'idea' idea is another legacy of Descartes, who presents it in virtually the same place where he offers a better idea of ideas. In the third Meditation, he says:
if I hear some sound, if I see the sun, or feel heat, I have hitherto judged that these sensations proceeded from certain things that exist outside of m e . . . . And my principal task in this place is to consider, in respect to those ideas which appear to me to proceed from certain objects that are outside of me, what are the reasons which cause me to think them similar to these objects. (Descartes 1641)

Here, ideas are equated with representations, the conscious having of which is indistinguishable from such things as the experience of seeing, or seeming to see, thus and so. That is the 'idea' idea which moved Locke and others. But immediately before that remark, Descartes says:
for, as I have the power of understanding what is called a thing, or a truth, or a thought, it appears to me that I hold this power from no other source than my own nature. (Descartes 1641)

Here, Descartes equates having an idea, or concept, with a specific 'power' or capacity. That is Descartes's better idea. Leibniz took the better idea, rejecting the 'idea' idea, which is why he wrote, for example:
And, in effect, our soul always has within it the quality of representing to itself whatever form or nature, when the occasion arises for thinking about it. And I hold that this quality of our soul, inasmuch as it expresses some nature, form, or essence, is properly the idea of the thing. (Leibniz 1686)

and the same idea simply because they are to be taken to do just that, was developed in some detail by Wittgenstein in his later philosophy, which suggests something that might be made of the Lockean intuition. One could never proceed very far along the Lockean path from particular to general without being innately constituted to go on in certain ways as opposed to others. Here, too, Wittgenstein has much to say. He recognizes that the intricate sorts of judgments we often make, e.g., a specific judgment that Pia knows where Hugo is tonight, rest on a background of shared 'natural reactions.' However, construing these reactions in terms of innate ideas often fails to serve the required purpose in describing our cognitive transactions. The ideas of a progression from particular to general, and of systems of natural reactions, need not be incompatible with the idea of innate ideas. However, these Lockean ideas, given fresh life by Wittgenstein, run counter to some Leibnizian arguments for innate ideas. In Wittgensteinian terms, where we work out, say, that wormwood is not sugarplums, Leibniz illegitimately sees us as 'operating with a calculus according to definite rules' (Wittgenstein 1958: Sect. 81). These ideas may harbor an alternative picture of logical competence, though this but gestures at as yet unexplored territory. See also: A Priori; Chomsky, Noam; Concepts.

Such differing conceptions of having an idea or concept have often led to mutual incomprehension in 'innate ideas' debates.
4. From Particular to General: A Further Application

Locke's case against a Leibnizian account does not just rest on the 'idea' idea. Locke also had the plausible intuition that, for example, where inference or proof is concerned, we proceed from the particular to the general case. First, we learn that such-and-such a specific argument is a good or a bad one. When we have learned many specific facts of this sort, acquiring along the way an ability to go on to novel cases in particular ways, the character of our final state may be described correctly by saying that we know suchand-such general principles. (This is to model knowledge of good argument on knowledge of furniture— we first see specific sofas, then later get the general idea.) The notion that an idea of great subtlety and complexity, about whose general features there is much to say (e.g., an idea of oneself, of a proposition, of knowledge) may arise out of many special-case, small-time rules and facts, all of which hold for one
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The term 'intentionality' derives from Scholastic philosophers' use of 'intentional' to mean mental or existing in or for the mind or having an essence consisting in appearance. Franz Brentano, who revived the term in his Psychologic vom empirischen Standpunkt (1874), characterized intentionality somewhat unclearly as a property, possessed by mental phenomena, of having 'reference to a content, a direction upon an object (by which we are not to understand a reality in this case).' Given the parenthesis, it seems that Brentano meant to exclude the property of direction upon a real object. In recent philosophy, intentionality has been seen as a family of properties distinctive of representations in general, that is, of public representations (words, pictures, diagrams, sculptures, as well as mental phenomena (perceptions, judgments, beliefs). Modern usage treats intentionality as representationality. This wide category includes mental and linguistic semantic properties such as reference, sense, and intension. The topic is intimately connected with recent theories of language; if there is a 'language of thought,' then the tools developed for studying natural languages will surely help to shed light upon its properties. 1. Aboutness There are several senses in which a representation may be said to be 'about' an object. If a person visually hallucinates a pink elephant, or judges that there is a pink elephant in front of him, his visual experience or judgment is in a sense directed upon a pink elephant, even if no pink elephant is present. This 'subjective aboutness' was probably Brentano's main concern, and it has also been much studied within the tradition of phenomenology. The ability to represent nonexistent things is also possessed by pictures and sentences; it is not unique to mental phenomena. If a subject correctly perceives or judges that there is an apple in front of him, his mental act is directed upon a real apple. Real aboutness is also not unique to mental phenomena. In such cases, it may be suggested that the representation has two objects, a real object and an intentional object. If the perception or judgment had not been veridical, it would have lacked a real object but it still would have been subjectively about an apple. This insight lies behind all attempts to study pure intentionality without looking at the external world. Another distinction exists between a representation's being of a particular and a representation's being about any member of a class. The sentence 'Tom thinks that a man is in the kitchen' could be interpreted as meaning that there is a par-

ticular man, say Jim, whom Tom thinks is in the kitchen, or as meaning that Tom thinks that some man or other is in the kitchen. In fact, the idea of 'direction upon an object' runs together a host of issues that modern theories of reference try to separate. 2. Content Representations of all sorts also have content, sense, or meaning. A perception or a judgment, but equally a sentence, a picture or a diagram, can represent an object as having a property, or as being of a certain kind. Some, but not all representations have prepositional contents: they represent that something is the case. Having a content is, perhaps, more essential than having an object. Some representations (e.g., the belief that it is raining) are not 'directed upon an object,' yet they have contents. However, recent work in the philosophy of mind has unearthed many kinds of content, and several distinct notions of it. Here too, the topic of intentionality fragments. Many philosophers accept that mental intentionality has primacy. The meaningfulness of pictures and words depends upon their being interpreted as meaningful by their producers and consumers, whereas mental states have contents for their possessors regardless of whether anyone actually ascribes contents to them. The central problem of intentionality is to explain mental content and mental aboutness. Other items derive their content and aboutness from the original mental intentionality of their human makers and users. 3. Intentionality and Intensionality A caveat must be issued concerning intensionality. This term refers to a cluster of semantic peculiarities exhibited by certain types of sentences, including sentences with modal operators, sentences used to state causal and other explanations, and sentences used to report prepositional attitudes. Such sentences are concerned to get across information about attributes, aspects, or points of view. The rationale for construing prepositional attitude reports intensionally is connected to the fact that such reports are second-order representations. They are linguistic representations, they have prepositional contents, but they are about mental representations which have contents in their own right. The report must not be confused with that which is reported. The mental state ascribed by an intensional sentence is not itself intensional. This article is not concerned with the semantics of prepositional attitude sentences. It is hard to theorize
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Language and Mind about the mind without theorizing about talk about the mind, but on the other hand it is important to avoid intellectualist or sententialist fallacies. It would be clearly fallacious to infer, from the fact that a true ascription of a thought was in English, the conclusion that the thought itself was in English. Equally, one cannot argue that the content of a person's perception was conceptualized by that person, simply from the fact that an ascriber conceptualizes the perception when he reports it. Yet it is sometimes legitimate to base a hypothesis about a mental representation upon facts and intuitions about the correctness or incorrectness of certain ways of reporting it or talking about it. Many of the arguments employed by philosophers in the late twentieth century have attempted to do just this.
4. Contemporary Philosophical Background

Discussion has been strongly influenced by scientific naturalism, and by the idea that mental discourse is a 'folk theory.' 4.1 Science and Mental Phenomena The natural sciences constitute our most successful and systematic body of knowledge. The scientific world view eschews supernatural entities and forces. Intentional phenomena have not yet been fully explained by science, but it is desirable that psychology be integrated eventually with biology and physics. If this cannot be done, something will have to give, and naturalists fear that the likely loser will be our current conception of the mind. Philosophers have seen their task as that of investigating, in cooperation with the sciences, whether the mind can in principle be naturalized, and if so, how. 4.2 Folk Psychology The terms and generalizations that ordinary people use to describe the mind (in particular concerning beliefs and desires) constitute a theory, so it is said, because the terms purport to denote states which are hidden inside the person, and the generalizations yield predictions and explanations by adverting to interactions among such states. It is nfolk theory, because it is taken for granted by everybody in the culture and is unreflectively transmitted by one generation to the next. From the ordinary person's point of view, it does not seem to be a theory at all. Philosophers, distancing themselves from the mental 'language game,' have sought to evaluate folk psychology by the same criteria they use to assess empirical theories in the philosophy of science. Are the theoretical terms to be construed in a realist or an instrumentalist way? If realist, do the terms in fact refer to real states and properties, and are the generalizations true? If there are such states and properties, are they reducible to the states and properties recognized by other branches of science? If they are not reducible, are they ground56

able? In the space of possible answers, almost every position has been occupied by someone or other (for surveys, see Fodor 1985; Dennett 1987). There exist, of course, professionals concerned with mental states; academic and clinical psychologists borrow these popular constructs. The question is whether this is good policy. The rise of interdisciplinary cognitive science has inspired searching critical reflection upon the very idea of mental representations. Probably the dominant view has been that although folk psychology is flawed in some ways, much of it seems sound. Is it possible, permissible, or necessary to individuate psychological states by their intentional contents? Eliminativists say it is retrograde (Churchland 1981) and observer-relative (Stich 1983), but their censures have not persuaded many to drop the habit. What criteria of individuation should cognitive science use? Should it be methodologically solipsist? At what processing levels (personal and subpersonal) should contentful states be postulated? Prescriptions for science are not the same as descriptions of folk psychology as it is. It seems sensible to get clear about the principles of classification which people actually use before passing judgment upon them. Many important discoveries about contenttaxonomies were made in the 1980s. 4.3 Semantic Information Theory Philosophers have also drawn upon the resources of a content-based theory that is distinct from folk psychology, namely, semantic information theory. Dretske (1981) has shown how to analyze the intentionality of natural information bearers (signals) in a wholly physicalist way. There can be no objection to employing this notion in science. Questions do arise, however, concerning its relation to the notion of mental intentionality. Some theorists hope that the notion of information will open the door to a reductive analysis, while others hold the two notions to be mutually irreducible. 4.4 Causal Efficacy of Content Why does mental intentionality have question marks hanging over it? One reason is the suspicion that it is a mere epiphenomenon. Folk psychology treats the contents of mental states as causally relevant. When a desire and a belief jointly produce an action, their combined contents jointly determine which type of action is produced. But many theorists doubt whether contents can be causally efficacious; the popular assumption may be a myth. Their doubts spring from reflection upon the Hobbesian idea, exploited in Artificial Intelligence, that ratiocination equals computation. A digital computer is useful precisely because its internal states can be assigned external semantic values. The computer is programmed to juggle its internal states according to rules and thereby to model real-world operations upon the entities that are the

Intentionality states' semantic values. But the fact that the computer models reality is not relevant to how it works. The transitions from one state to another are determined by the physical structure of the machine and its program, interacting causally with the physical aspects of the states. These processes would be exactly the same even if the states had not been assigned any 'meanings.' Computers are physical engines that realize syntactic engines. They seem to be semantic engines but really are not; for their semantic properties do no causal work (Searle 1980; Dennett 1982). If the intentionality of a mental state is like the semanticity of a computational state, it too is causally irrelevant to the production of subsequent mental states and bodily movements. Contents ride along on top of the physical properties which 'encode' them. This powerful line of argument relies on quite a few assumptions. Reactions to it take two main forms. One is to query the analogy between computer semantics and mental semantics. After all, mental phenomena are not assigned meanings, they have meanings intrinsically (but see Dennett 1987 for a dissenting opinion). The second reaction has been a revival of interest in how reason-giving explanations work, and in the notions of causal efficacy, causal relevance, and explanatory relevance.
5. Varieties of Intentional Contents

ism be capable of cognizing that p. Subpersonal states do carry information, so this kind of intentionality may legitimately figure in theorizing about how the brain processes information, but some writers have doubted that the notion of mental content can be fully analyzed in informational terms. The sheer range of types of mental contents makes the reductive task a daunting one. 5.2 Mental Content Mental contents are multifaceted. They have semantic properties (truth-conditions or satisfaction conditions, reference, truth-values); explanatory roles; internal structures (concepts and other content-elements are combined in various ways); and they are integrally related to other contents in networks governed by minimal rationality constraints. It is not surprising, therefore, that they can be typed according to various principles. The main ways of classifying, expanded upon below, are by manner of presentation, by Fregean modes of presentation contained within them, and by real-world referents. 5.2.7 Manner of Presentation Seeing that there is an apple in front of you is a different experience from thinking (without seeing) that there is an apple in front of you, even when the object is the same. Not only are seeing and thinking different attitudes, but also the contents are different. Whether an object is presented perceptually or conceptually (or perhaps volitionally) makes a difference to how the content is individuated. Peacocke (1986a) has argued that certain perceptual contents, which he calls 'analogue contents,' cannot be adequately individuated by the rules for individuating conceptual modes of presentation. 5.2.2 Modes of Presentation Some thought-contents are purely descriptive; they involve the exercise of general concepts only. On the other hand, singular thoughts may incorporate either an individual concept or 'mental name' of an individual thing, or they may contain indexical elements: the subject thinks about an object demonstratively as 'this' or 'that,' or thinks about a place as 'here' or 'there,' or about a time as 'now' or 'then'. Also some thoughts are anaphoric. These are completed by being thought against the background of other thoughts and memories to which they hark back. Frege called these various ways of thinking 'modes of presentation.' Content-classification must take account of modes of presentation in order to capture the roles that thoughts play in rational inferences and in the control of behavior. Frege's 'intuitive criterion of difference for thoughts' (Evans 1982) is that if a rational person judges an object to have property P and at the same time judges it not to have property P, it must be the case that he conceives the object under distinct modes
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5.7 Information Content The distinction between information content and mental content parallels Grice's distinction between natural meaning ('indicating') and non-natural meaning. A natural sign (the signal) carries information about another event or state in virtue of a nomic dependence of the former upon the latter (Dretske 1981:198-99). For example, the firing of a neural unit in the frog's brain indicates that there is a bug in the frog's visual field if, and only if, under normal conditions the unit fires just when a bug flies in front of the frog. Dretske (1988) has refined the basic notion of'indicating' in a number of ways. He constructs the notion of 'functional meaning' out of the idea of a structure's acquiring the biological function of indicating something. He thereby gives sense to the idea that a structure can mean that p on occasions when, because p is false, the structure fails to indicate that p. By this move Dretske diminishes the conceptual distance between the naturalistic notion and the mentalistic notion, for it is a key feature of judgments and beliefs that they can misrepresent as well as correctly represent. Many philosophers join with Dretske in hoping that the marriage of information theory with biological teleology will help to explicate mental intentionality. However, there is nothing psychological about the basic notion of information; a footprint in the sand can carry information. Even if there is an organism for whom an internal state is supposed to indicate that/?, it is not necessary that the whole organ-

Language and Mind of presentation in the two judgments. If not, the person is inconsistent. Also the mode of presentation employed will determine the thought's explanatory role. For example, the indexical 'self mode of presentation and demonstrative modes of presentation of objects link in special ways to agency. 5.2.3 Real-world Referents Thoughts about objects, kinds, and properties can be classified in a way that is sensitive to the entities that they represent. If the thought's identity is made to depend upon its worldly object, then its content is likewise world-dependent or 'externalist.' Evans (1982) defines a 'Russellian singular thought' to be one whose object is literally a constituent of it. Without the object, there would be no genuine thought. Similar accounts have been given of thoughts about natural kinds. Putnam (1975) showed that the meanings of natural-kind words are not fully encoded in the heads of speakers or hearers; the actual referent of 'water' helps to fix its meaning. The same could go for naturalkind concepts. Perhaps the actual referent of the concept water helps to individuate that concept. A different referent would make a different concept even if the two concepts seemed subjectively the same. The distinctions already made between Fregean modes of presentation can be grafted onto the referent-sensitive typology to yield a set of finegrained modes of presentation individuated jointly by cognitive role and by real-world referent.
6. Is Intentionality in the Head?

How one classifies a person's mental state depends on one's interests, and there seem to be plenty of ways to choose from. But can these crosscutting taxonomies really coexist peacefully? Is there not a 'right' one, or one that is 'best for scientific purposes'? A full treatment of the many arguments cannot be given here. A central issue concerns the location of contents: are they wholly in the head? It is useful to look first at singular thoughts, then at general thoughts. It would be hard to deny that Evans-style singular thoughts, if they exist, are object-involving, and folk psychology certainly makes heavy use of indexical thoughts whose referents are contextually fixed. If such thoughts are individuated by their truth conditions, they are not wholly in the thinker's head. Yet two-factor theorists claim that such thoughts can be dissected into an in-the-head component, and a external component (see Loar 1981; McGinn 1982; Block 1986). The inner component is said to have 'narrow content.' Narrow contents cannot be specified by 'that' clauses, but they can be got at indirectly by subtracting the contribution made by the subject's context to the determination of the object of thought. Fodor, in Psychosemantics (1987), holds that the narrow content of an indexical type is a function from contexts and mental episodes onto truth conditions.

Fodor is not an eliminativist about intentionality; the representational folk theory can be salvaged for science provided the representations are suitably trimmed. The trouble with singular thoughts, in his view, is that they crosscut the scientific classification. A content-based taxonomy should facilitate causal generalizations about types of thought, and this means abstracting from the contexts in which thought tokens occur. The causal interactions between thoughts inside the head must hold in virtue of their narrow contents. This is the traditional view. Note, however, that if narrow contents were causally epiphenomenal, computational psychology would not need them any more than it would need wide, world-involving contents. All its causal generalizations would be over neural states typed physically or syntactically (Stich 1983). Turning now to general thoughts which are not directed upon particular objects, if contentexternalism says that contents are world-involving, can it possibly apply to these? McGinn (1989) distinguishes two versions: weak externalism holds that a given content requires the mere existence of an object or property in the world at large, while strong externalism insists that real relations (e.g., a causal relation) must be instantiated between the subject and worldly items. The strong version seems appropriate for, say, demonstrative thoughts; the subject must be in the context of the object at the time of thinking the demonstrative thought about it. But perhaps some thoughts require that there should have been causal interactions between the subject and things in the past, that is, that S's life-historical environment had to be a certain way. The intuition here is that S's concept water (say), exercised at time t, had to develop out of S's earlier experiences. If the formative experiences prior to t had not been interactions with genuine HH) samples, the concept exercised at t would not have been the concept water. And perhaps the same goes for concepts for simple qualities: past experience of genuine instances of quality Q is necessary in order for the current concept to count as concept Q. So externalism has some plausibility for general thoughts. The subject has indeed strayed a long way away from Brentano.
7. Normative Aspects of Intentionality

According to Peacocke (1986b), the nature of concepts and contents can be illuminated by investigating what it is for a person to possess concepts. His approach immediately brings normative considerations to the fore, since possessing a concept involves knowing how to employ it correctly. Frege took concepts to be abstract entities, graspable by many minds but not dependent for their existence upon minds. Wittgenstein said that mastery of a concept was an ability to follow a rule. Both emphasized that, because a concept can be exercised

To characterize the structure of language adequately, linguists require a considerable array of concepts, many of them quite abstract, corresponding to classes of the 'clause,' the 'phrase,' the 'word,' etc. To characterize the content of linguistic expressions a further array of concepts is required, corresponding to the types of 'objects' and 'properties' denoted, of 'propositions' expressed, of 'modes of expression' and so forth. Thus, in order to give an adequate account of how any utterance functions, it is necessary to deploy this army of concepts. Yet young children, 4 or 5 years of age, use and understand the simpler structures of their native language fluently, without benefit of any special instruction and often despite quite unhelpfullooking regimes of child-rearing. In order to do so, it seems as if children must employ mental structures homologous to the linguists' concepts. But it is known

from other work that children's ability to construct concepts of arbitrary categories is initially very weak and develops slowly.
1. Approaches to the Problem

This paradoxical observation has one well-known resolution, namely that the necessary concepts do not have to be constructed by children; instead, they are innately specified. In addition it is often proposed that the mental apparatus needed to speak and understand language is encapsulated and isolated from other cognitive resources, that it constitutes a 'mental module.' This module has several parameters, initially set to default values. In the course of development, exposure to the language around them 'triggers' the values of these parameters to appropriate settings, perhaps
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Language and Mind according to some maturational schedule also regu- posed to treat the phenomena in this way—these may be called 'constitutional categories'; (b) because the lated by inherited material. Another route towards a resolution involves a num- phenomena form a natural cluster, isolated from other such clusters—'environmental categories'; or (c) ber of linked ideas: (a) that to characterize children's early language because, arising from some purpose of the individual, adequately a much reduced and simpler set of it makes sense to treat the phenomena in this way— 'constructed categories.' Examples of constitutional concepts is required; (b) that children are more adept at constructing categories might be certain regions of the color solid or certain classes of auditory event; a case has been concepts than hitherto supposed; (c) that to employ a concept explicitly, as a linguist made that some natural kinds such as lions and zebras does, is a very different thing from employing are environmental categories (Mervis and Rosch 1981), although not all natural kinds are. It may be it tacitly, as a speaker does; (d) that the contribution of genetic material to the that artefactual kinds like/orfc or spoon provide purer process of acquisition is much more general, cases of isolated clusters than do natural kinds. The thus not encapsulated, or perhaps confined to best examples of categories that are clearly consome specific aspect of language, for instance structed are perhaps those categories of number, quantity, relation, etc. whose development was investo production and reception of speech. The general theory of acquisition attempting this sort tigated by Piaget (1952). The term 'kind' is used as of resolution is known as 'semantic bootstrapping.' It shorthand for what are sometimes called 'sortal categories'—categories whose members are readily indihas been explored by Pinker (1984). So knowledge of children's categorization abilities, viduated and, say, counted. Thus, dog denotes a sortal of the sorts of concept they are able to construct and category. How many dogs are here? deserves an of the innate resources that these abilities imply, is answer, and gets one. But How many red things are needed in order to make an adequate assessment of here? does not. For example, if there is a red handkerthe plausibility of the program just outlined. Also, chief, should we count each thread, or molecule, etc.? whatever theory of first language acquisition is The categories defined by qualities such as colors, proposed, such knowledge is needed in order to set shapes, etc. are thus clearly not kinds. This distinction upper limits to the possible content of children's utter- is ancient, sortals corresponding to Aristotle's subances. The thought expressed may only partially sum tia secunda. reflect the thought that prompted expression, but it is Mervis and Rosch's influential review (1981) presurely absurd to propose that the former exceeds the sented evidence that a particular level within natural latter in complexity of content. These two relation- kind hierarchies was psychologically privileged. Catships are very programmatic and it cannot be claimed egories at this level, called 'basic-level categories,' are that much progress has been made with either of them. environmental categories inasmuch as withinThus far the most profitable relationship between chil- category similarity is maximal relative to betweendren's categorization and first language has been the category similarity at this level. They argued that this converse one; namely, that study of early language level is the point of entry to the hierarchy for children, can reveal facts about early categorization (Vygotsky pursuing an older insight of Brown (1958), and the 1962), although here—by the same reasoning—con- level of category most easily manipulated by adults in clusions about the content of early language can only a range of experimental tasks. For biological hierset lower limits to categorization abilities. archies, this level falls roughly at the level of the genus The reader should perhaps be warned that there (e.g., tiger, as opposed to Felid, or Siberian tiger). is no clear consensus amongst scholars about either Whereas constitutional categorization is precognitive or linguistic development during this period sumably automatic, and environmental categorof childhood: in both fields a range of well-supported ization may come about as the outcome of simple views is encountered spanning the two positions perceptual processes that detect some invariant propsketched above (Ingram 1989 provides a balanced erty that distinguishes the isolated clusters with review; Piattelli-Palmirini 1980 records a famous and reasonable reliability or by other simple methods, coninstructive dispute). As noted above, there are structive categorization is presumed to involve mental even those who deny that the two fields of develop- effort, at least in early stages of the categorization ment are in any way connected. process. The operation of these processes by no means always progresses from the particular to the general, 2. Categorization nor does it follow the same pathways in different comFrom a psychological perspective, categorization is munities. To illustrate, initial stop consonants may involved whenever an individual treats distinct be allocated to numerically distinguished constructed phenomena as if they were the same recurrent categories of voice onset time (with the aid of suitable phenomenon. This arises in at least three different instruments). These categories are of course finer ways: (a) because the individual is biologically dis- grained than the categories detected by unaided
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Language Acquisition: Categorization and Early Concepts listeners, and these latter environmental categories are different in different speech communities, say Spanish and English. Moreover, although it is unclear whether children form relevant constitutional categories, their discrimination of stops varying in voice onset time is certainly sharpest around environmental category boundaries. So one may say that the environmental categories formed have an established constitutional basis, at least.
3. Concepts

It is essential to distinguish between the mental structure which represents a category and the category itself. Within psychological discussions, these mental structures corresponding to and representing categories have been called 'concepts.' (This usage is different from that found in most philosophical discussions, following Fregean practice, in which concepts are taken to be abstract entities specifying the intension of a category.) Two important varieties of concept are, or ought to be, distinguished: 'individualconcepts' and 'type-concepts.' Concepts may represent categories in different psychological functions. Perhaps the simplest such function is 'recognition.' Preliminary definitions would then be: (a) An individual-concept is a mental structure that enables recognition of the same individual, encountered at different times and places; (b) A type-concept is a mental structure enabling recognition of different individuals as being of the same type (i.e., belonging to the same category). In the late twentieth century, most psychologists outside the behaviorist and some cognitive-science traditions insist on rather more by way of definition than what is offered above. The definitions given above are minimal in several senses. For instance, recognition can be based on a very partial specification of the recognized individual or type, provided individuals and types are well-separated in the world in question. To take an example from Dennett (1987:290), in a particular country, a coin-operated device may distinguish the desired type of coin from others on the basis of a partial specification of weight and shape, ignoring, say, embossed or engraved marks and inscriptions. As an instantiated type-concept such a device is very defective, though it may work well enough, since the objects inserted form well-separated clusters. If the device were improved in conceivable ways, then the danger would arise of its rejecting perfectly good coins because of surface imperfections, etc., so it may be seen that attainment of a fully effective instantiated type-concept is a difficult goal. In fact, it is an impossible requirement. A fully effective type-concept for a given coin specifies a history for the coin—that it was minted in a particular place by certain machines. Exactly the same conclusion follows for individual-concepts: ideal individual-concepts will

distinguish 'indiscernible' individuals (pennies, twins) and will not be diverted by 'disguise' changes. Ideal individual-concepts will therefore require the specification of a history as well. Though such ideal concepts perhaps cannot be attained, it is a common enough notion that concepts should not be ascribed to creatures or devices, unless they can pick out something like the correct category in most circumstances. This requirement of additional functionality may be characterized as a demand that concepts should be 'computationally effective.' A second notion of desired functionality, additional to that specified in definitions (a) and (b), is that concepts should be 'representationally effective': they should allow their possessors to hold the target individual/type in mind when it is absent or competing for attention with other categories. This notion of concept coincides more or less with Piaget's. A third suggestion for additional functionality is that concepts should be susceptible to combination, so that novel properties, relations, and relational properties may be constructed from familiar concepts. There is no doubt that this sort of additional functionality is highly desirable: the creative and imaginative capacities of individuals depend on the possession of such 'productively effective' concepts. These three different characterizations of the additional functionality required need not lead to three different theories of concepts. Instead, it may be reasonable to attempt a theory of concepts that satisfies all three requirements simultaneously. After all, the requirements answer to capacities that work together developmentally. Individuals become creatures that (a) are not easily fooled (concepts become computationally effective), (b) can think about remote objects, etc. (concepts become representationally effective), and (c) show some capacity for representational novelty (concepts become productively effective). Only the nature and origins of representationally effective concepts are discussed here. However, as noted, it is hoped that attainment of such concepts is at least associated with the other two sorts of additional functionality. The definitions (a) and (b) above clearly do not define concepts in any of the senses just described, but they are useful notions nonetheless. The structures defined there will be referred to instead as 'individual-' and 'type-detectors.' 3.1 Formation of Early Concepts Traditionally, following Vygotsky (1962) and Inhelder and Piaget (1964), it has been assumed that the freesorting task, in which children form a large collection of diverse objects into groups that share a similar property, depends upon the ability to hold the shared property in mind across the several sorting operations and despite constant change in the other properties.
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Language and Mind Typically, these tasks involve objects characterized by variation in size, shape, color, or similar simple properties, usually denoted by adjectives—qualities, in a word. So, on the basis of the well-known studies mentioned above the following research findings may be identified:
Finding (1): Children in the age range 3-6 years can hold a quality in mind so as to organize free-sorting performance, but cannot readily switch to a different principle of organization, nor coordinate two such principles in multiplicative fashion.

Such children then, according to the criterion of representational effectiveness, possess concepts of these qualities, although there are still some limitations to the flexibility with which they are employed. Younger children, although unable to form concepts of these properties, can execute simpler versions of the free-sorting task. Ricciuti (1965) showed that if the set of objects to be sorted consists of subsets of objects belonging to different simple kinds, such as dolls and boats, and if one requires only that the subjects should touch or handle these subsets successively (rather than form them into spatial groups), then even 1-year olds show some ability and 2-year olds can carry out the task, thus redefined. These findings have been confirmed by Sugarman (1983), who also showed that 2year olds will treat locally well-separated categories (for example, a set of green cylinders and a set of red circles) as if they were kinds. So, taking Ricciuti's and Sugarman's results together one arrives at the second research finding:
Finding (2): Children in the age range 1-3 years can hold some sortal categories in mind so as to organize their free-sorting performance.

Such children can therefore form concepts of some kinds, but cannot form concepts of qualities. These sortals cover roughly the same ontological ground as Mervis and Rosch's notion of basic-level category. Also, the timing of this achievement, beginning around 18 months, coincides with Stage 6 of 'object permanence' (Piaget 1954). If this latter achievement is taken as marking the first construction of representationally effective individual concepts, then it would seem that the formation of concepts of simple individuals and concepts of basic-level categories are developmentally simultaneous. This is perhaps not surprising, in view of the next finding, after Mervis and Rosch, that individuals play an important role in the formation of such concepts:
Finding (3): Basic-level concepts are resemblance structures. For any such concept and the population that employs it, some objects (stereotypes or prototypes) are better examples of the target category than others. Judged membership of such categories depends on similarity to the prototypes rather than on some (set of) common attribute(s).

Readers with philosophical backgrounds will be reminded of similar discussions in traditional metaphysics, notably in connection with the problem of universals (see Armstrong 1980). In that context (sometimes called 'first philosophy') the problem is to characterize the notions of object and property (by means of the metaphysical notions of particular and universal—or not, as the case may be)—-so as to give a satisfactory account of what things there are. The psychological context is different: it is to characterize a variety of mental representations—concepts—so as to give a satisfactory account of how we come to know whatever things there are. However, as noted, there are many affinities between the two sorts of investigation. In metaphysical discussions, whether realist or nominalist in tendency, such resemblance structures have often been proposed as characterizations of properties. In realist analyses, beginning with Plato, there is a single external target against which resemblance is measured, a pure or Ideal Form: in nominalist analyses, for example, the well-known discussion of games by Wittgenstein (1951), there is an endless chain of global resemblance. However, as has often been pointed out, one is left minimally with the universal properties (relations) of resemblance and with the task of characterizing these. Similarly, in the account of concepts given in finding (3), one is led to wonder on what fundamental capacities the judgment of similarity to prototype depends. Substantial help is provided here by study of the ranges of application of children's first names for basic-level categories. Studies by Clark (1973) and especially Bowerman (1978) make it quite evident that judged similarity is by no means global but, rather, sharply structured by attributes, features, and qualities of shape, color, texture, etc. Although the theory of the development of word meaning proposed by Clark has now been discarded, it is sometimes forgotten that the data persist, and that these data show clearly that children's apprehension of similarity is strongly structured by these qualities. Hence the finding:
Finding (4): Children younger than 2 years form concepts with pronounced resemblance structure. However, similarity to prototype clearly depends on formation of concepts of attributes, features, and qualities. 4. Paradoxes of Early Concept Formation

The findings (1) to (4) just described generate two formidable developmental paradoxes:
Paradox (1): Whereas studies of object sorting and handling suggest that children younger than 3 years cannot yet form concepts of qualities, the studies of early word use suggest that they must have done so.

The distinction between minimal type-detectors (definition (a) above) and representationally effective type-concepts may be effective in resolving this puzzle. Or, conversely, this puzzle makes it evident that the

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Language Acquisition: Categorization and Early Concepts distinction is necessary. Whereas findings (1) and (2) pertain to representationally effective quality concepts, the bases of similarity in findings (3) and (4) are not quality concepts but quality detectors. A closely similar puzzle arises when one considers how individuals are recognized. To be sure, an individual concept must be essentially historical. Stage 6 of object permanence is only attained when the infant can construct a history for an individual as it is moved from place to place invisibly. Likewise, Piaget's story (1952:225) of his daughter Jacqueline's mistaken recognition of the slug encountered when leaving the house and some hundreds of yards further off suggests a failure to construct such a history. However, it must be presumed that recognition of individuals is often merely heuristic and depends not upon construction of a space-time trajectory but on the detected recurrence of a particular cluster of attributes and qualities. At any rate, under this presumption individual detectors consist of just such cluster-specifications. But this leads to:
Paradox (2): The formation of a type-detector depends on apprehension of the world as consisting of distinct individuals, rather than of a single recurring individual. This in turn depends upon the formation of individualdetectors which define unit categories. But such detectors can only be aggregates of perceived attributes, features and qualities, in other words of type-detectors, completing a vicious circle.

not well established until the fourth year. Early adjectives appear to denote instead temporary, undesirable properties such as hot, wet, dirty, and broken (Nelson 1976). These extrinsic properties are psychologically salient and command attention, whereas intrinsic properties of shape, color, etc., are always in competition for attention. It may be that the psychological prominence of these extrinsic properties makes it easier for children to form concepts of them. The prospects for establishing alignments between the developing conceptual apparatus of children and the structures of early language are therefore reasonably promising, and such alignments should assist the development of theory in both domains of development. Besides the obvious need for examination of other sorts of early concept than those so far explored, notably of concepts of action, study of the issues considered here is badly hampered by the lack of suitable metalanguage for describing the content of expressions (meaning) and the thoughts that prompt such expressions. See also: Language Acquisition in the Child; Thought and Language.
Bibliography Armstrong D M 1980 On Universals (2 vols.). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Bowerman M 1978 The acquisition of word meaning: An investigation of some current conflicts. In: Waterson N, Snow C (eds.) The Development of Communication. Wiley, New York Brown R 1958 How shall a thing be called? Psychological Review 65:14-21 Clark E V 1973 What's in a word? In: Moore T E (ed.) Cognitive Development and the Acquisition of Language. Academic Press, New York Dennett D C 1987 The Intentional Stance. Bradford Books, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Ingram D 1989 First Language Acquisition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Inhelder B, Piaget J 1964 The Early Growth of Logic. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London Katz N, Baker E, Macnamara J 1974 What's in a name? Child Development 45:469-73 Mervis C B, Rosch E 1981 Categorization of natural objects. Annual Review of Psychology 32:89-115 Nelson K 1976 Some attributes of adjectives used by young children. Cognition 4:13-30 Piaget J 1952 The Child's Concept of Number. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London Piaget J 1954 The Construction of Reality by the Child. Basic Books, New York Piattelli-Palmirini M 1980 Language and Learning: The Debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Pinker S 1984 Language Learnability and Language Development. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Quine W V O 1969 The nature of knowledge. In: Guttenplan S (ed.) Mind and Language. Oxford University Press, Oxford Ricciuti H N 1965 Object grouping and selective ordering

Paradox (2) is surely sensibly resolved by supposing that certain type-detectors of attributes, features, and qualities are genetically transmitted. Even the parsimonious philosopher Quine (e.g., 1969) allows some such innate quality 'space' as a cognitive given. These innate type-detectors will then bootstrap the process of acquisition of individual-detectors and then of novel type-detectors, breaking the vicious circle.
5. First Language and First Concepts

According to the previous section, 18-month-old children can form concepts of individuals and of certain environmental categories such as basic-level categories. But they cannot yet form concepts of qualities such as shapes or colors. These early concepts are underpinned by individual- and type-detectors, some of which detect constitutional categories and are therefore innately specified. Studies of early vocabulary broadly confirm these conclusions. Eighteen-month-old vocabulary contains many proper names and pronominal expressions denoting individuals, and nominal expressions denoting basic-level categories. Moreover, Katz, et al. (1974) showed that very young children, presented with the contrasting ostensions This is X and This is an X are apt to take X to denote an individual in the former case and a basic-level category in the latter. Expressions denoting qualities are slow to appear in early language, with color adjectives, for example,

The major thrust of studies of children's language development from the perspective of linguistics has involved the grammatical analysis of spontaneous speech samples obtained from the child's conversations with their mothers and other interlocutors. Phonological, lexical and discourse issues have also been pursued, but it is at the grammatical level that much of the research energy has been directed, in the main because it is here that links between linguistic theory and language acquisition are most directly made. Also, spontaneous speech from children is relatively easy to collect, and furnishes extensive corpora of utterances in naturalistic settings. These samples are used to estimate a child's grammatical status at successive stages of the developmental process. Certain utterances by the child have proved of particular importance for researchers. These are often referred to as 'errors.' More accurately, they are non-adult forms which the child produces, and they often provide a window into the child's construction of grammar which would not otherwise be available. The most frequently cited example of this in English is overregularization of past tense. Productions by the child of forms like corned, bitted, and buyed, in place of the irregular forms came, hit, and bought are evidence of grammatical immaturity, certainly, but they also indicate clearly that the child has mastered the rule for regular past tense formation. While the focus of enquiry has not changed over the 30 years or so of linguistic studies of language acquisition, methodological advances and theoretical reformulations have had significant effects on the field. The following sections will concentrate on the major trends in the methodology and theory of child language studies, so far as they relate to grammatical development.
1. Methodology and Theory: The First Phase

1962, following a five-year period Brown had spent at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The project, written up in Brown (1973) and numerous theses and research papers, was designed to determine the stages of grammatical acquisition in Englishspeaking children. In its concentration on the child's construction of grammar, independently of the context in which it was acquired, using as a database longitudinal samples of children's speech over the whole of the preschool period, Brown's project is a model which other researchers in the field have copied, modified or reacted against. This section therefore begins by looking in more detail at the methodology of this important study, as a starting-point for a more general consideration of methodological and theoretical issues in the field.
1.1 Sampling the Data

The modern history of the study of children's language development begins in the early 1960s. Not surprisingly, for any branch of linguistic research in the second half of this century, Noam Chomsky was a formative, though initially indirect, influence. The first research project of the modern era was planned and directed by Roger Brown at Harvard University from
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The study of children's development over time (hence 'longitudinal') was not new with Brown. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century saw a number of 'diary studies' on the acquisition of various languages (see Ingram 1989: 7ff for a review). Typically an interested parent would note the child's utterances, from the emergence of recognizable words onward, and provide a commentary on what appeared to him/her to be interesting features. The frequency of entries, the timespan of the child's development covered, and the features of interest noted, were somewhat unpredictable from diarist to diarist. A major handicap for the diarist, and later researchers who wanted to use the information contained in them, was the inevitable selectivity imposed by the method of handwritten records of increasing quantities of speech once the child passed the second birthday. In his study, which examines the preschool development of three children (code-named Adam, Eve, and Sarah) Brown had the inestimable advantage over his diarist predecessors of being able to tape-record spontaneous speech samples from his subjects. This technological advance made a major difference to the data available to researchers. A permanent record of what the child and his interlocutors said was now available, which could be used to provide reliable writ-

Language Acquisition in the Child
ten records of conversations involving the child. Investigators were no longer limited by their own immediate memory of what the child said, but could collect lengthy samples, at regular sampling intervals, which could then be transcribed and analyzed at their convenience. Brown and his co-workers selected a sampling interval of one month for two of their subjects, and collected fortnightly samples for the third. It should be emphasized that the new methodology imposed costs. It has been estimated that one hour of conversation between mother and child can take up to 10 hours simply to transcribe. Adding in time for analysis, and remembering that monthly sampling intervals will provide over 40 samples for a typical monitoring of a child's language development between 18 months and five years of age, it will be obvious that this type of research is extremely laborintensive. This tends to lead, as seen in other studies, to a trade-off between number of subjects and sampling interval. The most important longitudinal study of the 1970s, by Gordon Wells in Bristol (Wells 1985), involved 64 children from 15 months to five years of age, but selected a sampling interval of three months, and each sample was limited in time to about 25 minutes. The advantage of Brown's study, and others like it, with a comparatively large amount of data on each child, at frequent sampling intervals, is that it is feasible to observe the organic growth of grammatical systems and subsystems. The large subject sample with correspondingly less data on each child may lack for some linguistic detail. It does, however, permit the investigation of the relationship between independent variables such as age, sex, social class, interaction, style, etc. on the dependent variable, language development. The Brown and Wells studies, a decade apart in the planning, were also distinct in their data collection procedures. The differences are instructive in what they reveal of shifts in thinking within the child language research community as the initially close relationship between linguistic theory and language acquisition study cooled. Brown collected his data in the child's living room, with the tape-recorder on show and at least one observer present to make notes on the conversation that mother and child engaged in. Wells, sensitized to the possible effects of the social context on language, and more particularly, of the importance of 'naturalistic' observation of the language used not only by the child, but by the mother to the child, removed observers from the sampling situation. Children in the study wore a wireless microphone, which transmitted to a remote tape-recorder which switched on and off, on each day of recording, according to a predetermined program, of which the family were not aware. 1.2 Innateness and Environment The first influential statement of this linkage between language acquisition and linguistic theory came in Chomsky (1965), where his so-called 'innateness' hypothesis drew a parallel between the task of the linguist in characterizing a new language, and the child in learning the grammar of the language of his surroundings. Noting that an infant is biologically ready to learn any language, Chomsky exploited the ambiguity of the term 'grammar,' as both the product of the linguist's explicit description of the language he is describing, and the implicit mental representation that the child establishes as the basis for his speech and understanding. Chomsky's hypothesis was that the child came to the language acquisition task with essentially the same equipment that the linguist brought to his work, i.e., a 'generative grammar.' In more recent terminology, the human infant is 'hardwired' for the acquisition task with prior expectations, in terms of linguistic universals about the language he will be exposed to. Given the obvious surface differences between languages, even those as closely related as, say, English and Dutch, such expectations will be at a rather abstract level of generality, e.g., the availability of an autonomous syntax, categories such as Noun, Verb, and the form of rule statements within the syntax. This specification of the formal apparatus available to the child was accompanied by assertions concerning the speed with which the child accomplished the acquisition task, and the defective nature of the data with which the child was presented for language learning. It was difficult to see, Chomsky argued, how the child could learn language in the face of these disadvantages without an extensive 'preprogramming' for language learning. The initial Chomskyan hypothesis suffered under two handicaps. First, toward the end of the 1960s, linguistic theory became somewhat less monolithic, and so the exact nature of the formal apparatus assumed to be available to the language learner became rather uncertain. Second, and more seriously, it was not at all clear how to address data from children's language learning to the innateness hypothesis. Brown, himself no formalist, was concentrating in his project on topics such as semantic relations in early grammar, and the order of acquisition of grammatical morphemes. Neither of these appeared directly relevant to the theoretical issues. A third problem was that one of Chomsky's buttressing arguments for the innateness hypothesis, the assumption of defective input, was becoming increasingly untenable. In its own version of the nature-nurture debate, language acquisition studies now polarized around a (temporarily) less influential Chomskyan view, and a body of research designed to characterize the input to children (child-directed speech or CDS), and (much more difficult) to test its role in the acquisition process (an overview of this work appears in Gallaway and Richards 1994). It had long been known that in the absence of input, children do not develop a language. Accounts of feral
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Language and Mind children—historical oddities such as The Wild Boy of Aveyron and others, who have been restored to normal human contact after a period of living wild—attest to this obvious point (Brown 1958: 189). But the character of input language to children, and its role, had not been extensively studied. It quickly became clear that CDS, at least among middle-class English-speaking mothers, the usual subjects of enquiry, constitutes an identifiable language variety. It has phonological modifications, nonsegmental and segmental, and specific grammatical characteristics. So, for example, fundamental frequency is higher than comparable speech to adults, and pitch range wider. Pronunciation is said to be more careful and precise than is usual in adult-to-adult conversation. Adults speak to children in short, grammatical sentences. It would be plausible to assume that such modifications would assist the child in the language learning task. It would be equally plausible, however, to interpret the modifications as ways adults have (or learn) to make themselves comprehensible to small children with limited language capacity. Studies which have attempted to resolve this issue by correlating the effects of variation in syntactic input on development, have had mixed success. One result which has been replicated, originally established by Newport, et al. (1977), concerns the effect of utterance-initial auxiliaries on the child's development of this category. There does appear to be a positive correlation. The more a mother uses auxiliaries like can, will, shall, in her utterances to her 18-month-old child, the more likely she is to hear them from the child six months later. While similar examples of established effects of syntactic variation in CDS on language growth in the child are few, research on the effect of discourse modifications—expansions or extensions by the interlocutor which pick up on the child's topic and expand or extend it—suggests that these strategies by mothers may be effective in facilitating language development. What is not clear is how any feature of CDS which turns out to be facilitative in language development actually achieves its effect. It is still necessary to hypothesize a learning mechanism, or a component of it, which can use the relevant input to advance its learning. 2. Methodology and Theory: The Current Phase The recording technology of the late 1950s allowed Brown to make permanent records of the speech of the children he was investigating. Apart from the major study by Wells that followed a decade after Brown, there have been dozens of other studies, initially on English and then on other languages, which have used tape-recorded language samples as the basis for the investigation of grammar construction. Some of these studies involve longitudinal sampling, where the same children serve as subjects at all stages of the research. Other studies have involved cross-sectional simulations of language development:
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groups of different children at different ages (e.g., a group of three-year olds, one of five-year olds, and a third of seven-year olds) provide the language samples. It is assumed that the linguistic changes one finds between, say, the members of the three- and fiveyear-old group are similar to those one would find if the same children were sampled at three and again two years later. 2.1 Data Archiving and Theoretical Debates By the end of the 1970s the field of child language was served by two academic journals, the Journal of Child Language and First Language, entirely devoted to research in the area. It was (see below) about to resume its close relationship with linguistic theory. It was in one sense rich in data, with nearly 20 years of data collection behind it. Data was not, however, readily accessible to researchers other than those associated with the particular project that had generated it, and there seemed no obvious way of aggregating data from different projects. At this point, in a project funded by the MacArthur Foundation, Catharine Snow and Brian MacWhinney founded the Child Language Data Exchange System (MacWhinney and Snow 1985; MacWhinney 1995). This is a computer archive of child language transcript data, with material from more than 20 projects on English (including the Brown and Wells data), and data in addition from Afrikaans, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Spanish, Tamil, and Turkish. The archive is available on request to any researcher and affords a facility to test hypotheses systematically against large bodies of quantitative data. This methodological advance leads to new theoretical insights. So, for example, Marcus, et al. (1992) were able to assess the validity of the assumption that the child's overregularization of past tense represents 'U-shaped' development. The reference is to learning which proceeds from initial correct forms (irregular pasts such as came, sang, hit) to a period in which, because of the acquisition of the regular past tense rule, the irregular past forms are substituted for by regularized forms (corned, singed, kitted). After this period of uncertainty, the child establishes essentially the adult system, with regulars and irregulars correctly differentiated. Marcus, et al. review an extensive range of data from the CHILDES database, and establish that, while overregularization rates do vary across children, these forms are in a relatively small minority—usually under 10 percent of all forms. So in reality there is no period of marked U-shaped development. (The U is to be imagined as a graph, with the first tail representing correct performance on irregulars, the trough representing a large number of errors, and then the second tail showing the child's recovery to correct performance on both regulars and irregulars). Marcus, et al. interpret the new data as indicating a process of development which advances from rote

Language Acquisition in the Child learning to the discovery of the regular rule. Once the regular rule is discovered, it applies to all verbs unless there is an irregular past tense form available in the child's lexicon, causing blocking of the general rule. Overregularization is attributed to a lack of memory strength for a 'blocking' irregular form. When an irregular form is unavailable, the regular past tense rule is applied to the irregular stem as a default. The Marcus, et al. study is a contribution to the debate about the acquisition of morphology, and ultimately about acquisition generally. It represents a perspective on learning which, in common with the majority of studies, assumes that the child's language development depends on the organization and reorganization of rules and representations. The alternative view, often referred to as 'connectionism,' sees statements such as the rule for past tense formation as merely descriptions of features of the language. The connectionist view sets out to demonstrate how a model of language acquisition could avoid reliance on mechanisms using rules that manipulate discrete symbols, but still account for what happens in the child's language learning. The battleground for the competing theories has been past tense formation in English, and the connectionists' hypothesis testing has implemented computer simulations of learning, using parallel distributed processing (PDF) models (Rumelhart and McLelland 1986; Plunkett and Marchman 1991). Such models are constructed in the form of networks (claimed to be analogous to neural networks) which are 'trained' on sets of past tense forms from the language, and which 'learn' from successive sweeps through the input. Successive outputs from the network can then be checked for their approximation to what is known of successive stages of the child's development. In the rather restricted area of the development of past tense, the simulations have been relatively successful, though they are still the subject of extensive debate. 2.2 Linguistic Theory and Language Acquisition As seen above, linguistic theory was a major influence on language acquisition studies at the outset. After a period of estrangement, the relationship was renewed during the 1980s as the reformulation of Chomskyan theory (which is referred to as 'Principles and Parameters Theory'—PPT) offered the prospect of testing predictions against language acquisition data, in a way that had not been possible before. It is obviously not feasible to deal with the full complexity of PPT here (see Atkinson 1992 for a book-length treatment. However, one of its crucial dimensions, parameterization, can be introduced via a specific example. The original linkage between linguistic theory and language acquisition depended on commonalities between languages at a rather abstract level. PPT maintains this view that there are universal features of language but also acknowledges cross-linguistic differences by specifying, within modules of the grammar, 'parameters'—dimensions of variation from which languages select possible values. The most widely discussed such dimension in the child language literature is the 'null subject parameter.' One of the differences between English and a Romance language like Italian is that in the latter subjects of sentences do not need to be explicitly realized by a noun phrase or a pronoun, as verb paradigms are inflected for person and number, as well as indicating tense. So an Italian hearing a sentence which consists only of a verb and an object noun will be able to identify the subject of the sentence from the verb form. In English, by contrast, subjects must be expressed. There are exceptions to this rule, but they are limited to certain well-defined contexts such as responses to questions, e.g.,
Q. what did you do? A. finished my drink and left.

Faced with the problem of learning their language, Italian and English children have to determine which way the null subject parameter is set, on the basis of the input evidence they hear. More generally, for each parameter that is made available within the theory to account for linguistic variation, the child has to determine which setting his particular language selects. The PPT theory is still very much an innateness hypothesis. As before, the child is seen as coming to the task of acquisition 'hard-wired' with the principles of the theory, and with the parameters. Input (earlier called CDS) is more significant, in this view of the linguistic theory-language acquisition relationship, but only to provide just enough evidence to set the relevant parameters. And input to the child is restricted to what is called 'positive evidence.' An important part of the argumentation for the new innateness hypothesis is that the child does not receive any overt evidence about the structure of the language. In particular, he receives no 'negative evidence' when he makes errors (such as overregularizations). This view does seem to be borne out by studies of CDS, at least so far as clearly explicit parental correction of syntactic or morphological error is concerned. Mothers and fathers do not generally take any notice of grammatical errors on the part of their preschool children. They seem to regard them, rightly, as a normal part of development, which the child will grow out of. Furthermore, even if an adult does try to correct overtly a child's error, the attempt is unlikely to be successful, unless the child is ready to make the change to the more adult-like form. As a consequence, any incorrect hypotheses about the structure of the language which are made by the child have to be eliminated by his own efforts, without any direct intervention by adults. This can only be achieved, it is argued, if the 'hypothesis space' for language learning is heavily constrained from the outset. The principles
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Language and Mind and parameters of linguistic theory are offered as the constraining influences. The child has certain degrees of freedom available, in making suppositions about the constituent structure of his language, but these are limited by the potential allowed by the parameters and the settings which they specify. How does this new version of the innateness hypothesis fare when subjected to empirical test? Hyams (1992) uses data from the CHILDES database to explore a child's setting of the null subject parameter for English. It is assumed that the child's original setting will be null. If the language he hears fails to have morphological paradigms of the Italian type, and has a high proportion of expressed subjects, this will trigger the resetting of the parameter to non-null. Hyams finds a rapid increase in the realization of subjects (from 10 to 70%) in a five-month period from 2 years 7 months to 3 years, and interprets this as the child realizing that English is not a null subject language. Not surprisingly the opening up of the innateness hypothesis to empirical test has led to attempts to provide alternative explanations of language development. Bloom (1990), for example, presents data to buttress his view that children acquiring English represent the correct grammars from the start, on the basis of input data, but omit subjects because of performance factors.
3. Conclusion

The exploration of the alternative models for language learning afforded by linguistic theory and connectionism will be central to research. Important information for both frameworks will be provided by cross-linguistic studies. A major program of research on the acquisition of languages other than English has been coordinated by Dan Slobin at the University of California, Berkeley for over 20 years (see Slobin 1985; 1992). Some of these languages, e.g., Hungarian, K'iche' Mayan (Guatemala), Walpiri (Australia), Western Samoan, are typologically very different from English (and each other). They provide new testing grounds for hypotheses concerning language acquisition. They may also, in turn, cause researchers to look afresh at the acquisition of English.

Language of Thought
R. Carston

The idea that there is a language of thought (LOT) amounts to this: having a thought with a particular content is a matter of being related in a certain way
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to a sentence in an innately given mental language. The sentences or formulas in this language (mentalese) are like the sentences of public natural languages

Language of Thought (Japanese, Urdu, English, etc.) in that they have syntactic and semantic properties. That is, they are composed of constituents in particular structural configurations and their semantics is a function of the semantics of their basic elements and their syntactic structure. The grammar of mentalese may, however, differ quite radically from the grammar of any natural language. The basic elements (concepts, perhaps) denote entities and properties in the world. The full formulas are truth-conditional, so have truth-values as determined by the way the world is, and they bear logical relations to each other, such as entailment. The following discussion is confined to descriptive thoughts (thoughts about states of affairs), but it should be noted that there are also what are called interpretive (or metarepresentational) thoughts (see Sperber and Wilson 1995). These are thoughts which represent other representations (such as thoughts or utterances); their relation with that which they represent is not one of truth/falsity but of prepositional resemblance (which is a matter of degree). The language of thought hypothesis is just as relevant to them as it is to truth-based descriptive thoughts, but they introduce considerable additional complexity.
1. The Representational Theory of Mind

The relevant notion of a thought here is that of an 'intentional' state of mind, where intentional mental states are those that have the property of being representational, that is, of being about the world. Beliefs, desires, intentions, hopes, and fears are different types of intentional mental states. They are sometimes called propositional attitudes since they involve the having of an attitude to a content or proposition, for example, having the belief attitude to the 'Mrs Thatcher has resigned' content. These intentional mental states play a central role in cognitive psychology in the explanation of human intentional behavior. For example, it is because Jane wants to drink some cola and she believes that there is some cola in the refrigerator that she goes to the refrigerator and reaches inside it. On the LOT view, having a belief or a desire, etc., with a certain content entails being in a relation to an internally represented sentence with that content, so the explanation of Jane's refrigeratororiented behavior will include a specification of the interaction of the sentences which represent the content of her relevant beliefs and desires. The LOT hypothesis arises then in the context of the current computational model of the mind, whereby mental processes, such as reasoning, are sequences of mental states and the transitions between states are effected computationally. Conceiving of these computations as formal/syntactic operations defined over mental representations gives a mechanical explanation for mental processes. That is, they operate on symbols in virtue of the form of the symbol, not in virtue of any semantic property of the symbol, just

like the operations performed by a computer or the transitions from line to line in a logic proof. This approach to the causal explanation of mental processes is known as 'methodological solipsism' (see Fodor 1981; Lycan 1990). It follows that as far as our cognitive life is concerned two beliefs or desires are distinct if and only if the representations of their contents are formally distinct. For example, the desire to meet the husband of Janet Fodor and the desire to meet the staunchest advocate of the language of thought hypothesis are identical in their truthconditional content (given that the definite description in each case picks out the same individual in the world, namely Jerry Fodor). However, so far as cognitive activity is concerned these are quite distinct types of desire as they may be the effects of different sequences of thought and each may cause further different thoughts. Furthermore, they may issue in quite distinct behaviors: in the first case one might telephone Janet Fodor to ask her and her husband for dinner, in the second one might seek out conferences on the philosophy of mind. The crucial point here is that thoughts have their causal roles as a function of their formal properties. Semantic properties are respected only insofar as they are mimicked by formal properties, which of course they are to at least some extent since deductive reasoning, which preserves truth, plays a major role in human thought.
2. Why Should Thoughts Have Syntactic Structure?

One could be an 'intentional realist,' that is, one could accept (a) that beliefs and desires really exist, (b) that they are physically instantiated in the brain, and (c) that they play a causal role in sequences of thought and in overt behavior, without positing a 'language' of thought in which the objects of attitudes are couched. What is crucial about language is constituent structure, that is, that a sentence is made up of parts and these same parts can occur in a range of different sentences. So what distinguishes the LOT view from other intentionally realist views is that it entails that belief/desire states are structured states. Fodor (1975) claimed that the language of thought was implicit in the computational approach to psychological explanation since computation presupposes a medium in which to compute. However, the emergence of an alternative computational approach, 'new connectionism' (see Sterelny 1990 for an introduction), indicates that more in the way of arguments for structured thought is required, since according to connectionism the mental causes of intelligent behavior can be modeled by patterns of activation across networks of nodes and connections, involving no level of symbolic representation. One of Fodor's arguments for syntactic thought (Fodor 1987a) involves an appeal to the 'productivity' and 'systematicity' of thought. The set of thoughts is potentially infinite and the ability to think any particular thought is intrin69

Language and Mind
sically connected to the ability to think various other thoughts. So, for example, anyone who can form the thought 'the ruthless spy has seen the desperate terrorist' can also form the thoughts 'the desperate terrorist has seen the ruthless spy' and 'the desperate spy has seen the ruthless terrorist,' etc. The parallel with natural language is obvious and the explanation for the productivity and systematicity of natural language is its combinatorial syntax and semantics, so it is natural to assume that thought too has combinatorial structure. However, see Clark (1994) and Maloney (1994) for a range of objections to the LOT thesis. 3. The Relation between Thought and Public Language Fodor believes that the semanticity of natural language, that is, the capacity of natural language symbols to be about the world, is dependent on the representationality of thought. So the answer to the question 'How is it that the sentence, Mrs Thatcher has resigned is about Margaret Thatcher?' is something like: 'Because that sentence is a vehicle for expressing a thought about Margaret Thatcher.' On this view an account of the semanticity of natural language will follow from an account of how it is that thoughts refer to the world. Attempts are being made to develop this logically prior theory of 'psychosemantics' (see, for example, Millikan 1984, Fodor 1987b, and Fodor 1990), though they are as yet embryonic. See also: Intentionality. Bibliography Clark A 1994 Language of thought (2). In: Guttenplan S (ed.) A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind. Blackwell, Oxford Fodor J 1975 The Language of Thought. Harvester Press, Sussex Fodor J 1981 Representations. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Fodor J 1987a Why there still has to be a language of thought. In: Fodor J Psychosemantics. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Fodor J 1987b Psychosemantics. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Fodor J 1990 A Theory of Content. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Lycan W G 1990 The language of thought hypothesis. In: Lycan W G (ed.) Mind and Cognition: A Reader. Blackwell, Oxford Maloney J C 1994 Language of thought (1). In: Guttenplan S (ed.) A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind. Blackwell, Oxford Millikan R 1984 Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Sperber D, Wilson D 1995 Relevance: Communication and Cognition, 2nd edn. Blackwell, Oxford Sterelney K 1990 The Representational Theory of Mind. Blackwell, Oxford

Private Language
C. Travis

The term 'private language' has several customary uses. For example, sometimes it refers to the phenomenon of children talking to themselves. Or it might refer to codes or idiosyncratic sign systems formulated for particular purposes, perhaps for private communication within a group. This article will discuss a special notion of private language which stems from Ludwig Wittgenstein, and is related to what has become known as 'the private language argument1 (i.e., Wittgenstein's argument against private language). This conception and the problems related to it concern foundational issues in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language. The questions to be addressed are: What is a private language in this sense? Why should Wittgenstein (or anyone) bother with it? What might an argument against it be? What is Wittgenstein's argument? (By way of proviso, it should be noted that there is a conception of Wittgenstein's later philosophy according to which his purpose is not to argue against positions, but to present alternative pictures, so as to show a picture not to

be compulsory. On that view, Wittgenstein has no 'private language argument.' This view of Wittgenstein is largely neglected in what follows. But it should be borne in mind.)

1. Preliminaries on Privacy Wittgenstein introduces the notion of a private language in Philosophical Investigations Sect. 243: But is a language conceivable in which one could record, or articulate, his inner experiences—his feelings, moods, etc.—for his own use?—Can't we do that in our usual language?—But I don't mean it like that. The words of this language would apply to what only its speaker can know; to his direct, private, experiences. So another cannot understand this language. (The term 'private language' does not occur before Sect. 256, where it appears in quotation marks.) Privacy may come in various strengths, according to what makes language private. Private language might

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Private Language just be language spoken by only one person. In that case, Robinson Crusoe, alone on his island, spoke a private language, especially if he invented his own terms for the strange flora and fauna he met there. So would the last surviving speaker of a vanishing Amerindian language. Most—though certainly not all—commentators agree that this is not what Wittgenstein had in mind, as the (unquoted) first half of Sect. 243 makes clear. If we came to rescue Crusoe, we would have no trouble seeing what his neologisms meant, nor do field linguists face special in-principle problems if they can find only one informant. In rescuing Crusoe, we do not rescue his language from privacy; it faced no such danger. That remark imposes a dual constraint: whatever the private language argument is, it should leave Crusoe untouched; whatever about our usual language lets it escape the argument should not vanish for one-speaker languages. Crispin Wright (1986) and Margaret Gilbert (1983) have each suggested, independently, two relevantly different notions of privacy. On one notion, words are private if their semantics, or content, or proper understanding, is available only to their speaker: only that person could produce words with that semantics, or understand/take words as having it. On the other notion, though two people, Pia and Pol, may each attach the same semantics, Pia to her words W, and Pol to his, W*, they could never have good reason to believe that that is what they were doing. These are certainly two ways of being unable to understand another's words. Whether the distinction matters depends on what the case against private language is.
2. Private Language and Mental Life

Why is private language worth thinking about? Partly because of its relation to our picture of mental life, or that part we care enough to have words for. Since a large stretch of the Philosophical Investigations before the private language discussion (from Sect. 138), and a large stretch after it, are concerned with questions about mental life, the conclusion that this is one of the points of the discussion seems inescapable. (Before Sect. 243, the concern is to attain 'greater clarity about the concepts of understanding, meaning, and thinking'; during and for a stretch after, the concern is primarily with sensations, notably pain.) The picture of the mind a private language discussion would target derives from Descartes. Notoriously, such a view weaves problems of mind into problems of knowledge. On this view, mental life consists, for the most part, of a series of events or experiences, which form, as it were, a stream of consciousness. Elements in this stream, since they are the subject's experiences, are directly accessible to his inspection, but not available for inspection by anyone else. So the subject can know what the elements are in a way in which no one else can. Moreover, they are independent of things outside our skins. While some

of them may represent such things as being thus and so (these, according to Descartes, are ideas), none requires anything of the 'external' world for its being the element it is. It cannot be essential to any of these experiences, for example, that it is an experience of seeing a cow; for then it could not occur without the cow. The actual elements of the scheme, on Descartes's view, are what might be in common to cases of seeing a cow and cases of only seeming to. Some would embroider this picture as follows: what I judge in judging my stream now to have a certain character (to contain elements of this or that type) is incorrigible; I could not, in principle, be wrong about it. The embroidery is not needed for a private language argument to get a grip. Note too that Wittgenstein concentrates on experiences, like pain, which are worldindependent in the required Cartesian sense. So it does not matter much for this discussion if there is no experience common to seeing a cow and only seeming to. I know what my mental life is, according to this picture, by observing its elements and seeing of each I observe that it is thus and so. That is to say, I may just see of an element that it is of a certain sort or type. I may observe it to be, roughly, a pain in the foot, or an intention to go sailing, etc. That is rough. But more precisely, of what type might I observe such an element to be? Thinking on the model of observable features of objects—colors, say—the feature or type in question would be fixed in this way: it is that feature observably exemplified by such and such elements in streams—the elements that exhibit such and such a pattern. That it is the one so exemplified is essential to identifying which feature it is. But the only elements I can observe, in principle, are ones in my own stream. So the feature I have in mind when I take one of my current elements to be thus and so must be fixed as the one exemplified by such and such (prior) elements in my stream; that is essential to its being the one I am thinking of. But now, what decides whether my current element is of that type? Only I could be in a position to judge that. My thought about my current element, in identifying it as such and such, is thus, in a clear sense, a unit of a private language.
3. Criticisms of Private Language Based on the Cartesian View of Mind

Insofar as the private language discussion is directed against this picture, the first point is this. It is simply not possible that only I can be in a position to see what is exemplified (by seeing what exemplifies it), consequently to judge whether an item has the character that there gets exemplified. A language that worked in such a way would be incoherent. It would have neither correct nor incorrect applications, to elements of a stream of consciousness or to anything else; there could be no standard of correctness for it. Conversely, any language, public or private, which does say some71

Language and Mind thing about our mental lives must have a publicly accessible semantics: anything which fixes in what way it says things, or a thing, to be—any facts relevant to determining whether it says things to be this way or that, or whether this or that would count as being as they are said to be—must be facts a multitude might, in principle, recognize to hold, and on which they might base their judgments. Crudely put, if words (about X's mental life) say X to be F, there must be a publicly observable, or specifiable, state of affairs of which one could truly say, 'This is (what we call) (X's) being F.' (This point is as much about thought as about language. To some, it has smacked of behaviorism. Whether it is that depends on what one allows to fall within the range of the observable. For Wittgenstein, it certainly was not that.) The general problem about our mental lives is this. There is a familiar system of concepts under which aspects of our mental lives fall. For each of us, there is also our own stream of consciousness—all those experiences we are aware of by, or in, having them. What is the relation between the two? Different things in different cases, no doubt. The private language discussion, viewed as aimed at this problem, shows one thing the relation could not be. To fit one of those concepts could not be for an element, or several, in one's stream to be thus and so, where what counts as being thus and so is only fixed given other facts about that stream which only its subject could see to hold. Given philosophy's penchant for making one thing out to be another, this idea that an activity makes sense only against some backgrounds—so that only against a certain background does it make sense to suppose given words to say anything at all—has suggested to some that the upshot of the private language discussion is a 'community view' of how (public) language is possible: for words W to have been spoken correctly, so for them to have said things to be as they are, is for their speaker to be in step with what the rest of his linguistic community would say. He says that his car is red; so would they. Speaking correctly just means not falling out of line with the community. However, that is the wrong way to see a background as functioning. It serves its purpose only if it remains in the background.
5. Formulating a Private Language Argument

The question, then, is whether some broader and more original point about language is made by the private language discussion. One way to press this question is by pressing on features of private language that have seemed to play a role thus far. For example, in the Cartesian model, private words applied to types or classes of private 'objects'—the elements of one person's stream. Must there be private objects for private language? Consider the made-up word gronch. It applies, let us suppose, to some vases, doorknobs, drapes, and turtles, but not to others. Only I, though, am able to discern what something's being gronch 4. Language and a Background of Shared Reactions The private language discussion does not only address requires. In principle, only I am ever in a position to the problem of mental life. It has a longer reach. make fully informed and authoritative judgments on Note that Sect. 243 is preceded by a brief discussion such matters. Is that private language? Or suppose a of language and thought in general. The point is that 'private' language did not belong to just one person, intelligible language or thought rests on a certain but, say, to 10. Might that still be private language? background of agreement in judgment. (Elsewhere Textual evidence suggests a 'Yes' answer both times Wittgenstein refers to systems of natural reactions.) (see, e.g., Sect. 207 and Sect. 237). To press further, ask what a private language arguThe kind of dependence involved is illustrated in Sect. 142: "The procedure of putting a lump of cheese ment might be. Here is the first of two suggestions. The on a balance and fixing the price by the turn of the private linguist, Pol, examines some thing or situation, scale would lose its point if it frequently happened for and judges that 'F' is true of it, F being some private such lumps to suddenly grow or shrink for no obvious term. (It matters not in the least whether the examined reason.' Similarly, the procedure of saying something thing is private.) But how does Pol know he has not to be thus and so—to fit, or not, a given concept, or made a mistake? Perhaps he misremembers what is to be, or not, as it is said to be in given words— involved in being F, or he is just bad at distinguishing would lose its point if there were no regularity in our Fs from Gs. If what it is to be F is anything one could reactions in taking things to be that way or not; if we remember, then this seems a possibility. But if it is, could not rely on what informed and reasonable peo- Pol cannot check that he has not made such an error, ple would do when called upon to judge such matters. except in ways that let just the same sort of doubt Were 'reasonable' people as mercurial in their reac- creep in again. So, since there are always doubts he tions in, say, taking things to be red or not, as Wittgen- cannot settle, it seems that he cannot ever know stein's cheeses, we would lose a range of facts as to whether F is true of a thing or not. But if he cannot where things are reasonably taken to be red, and with know this, no one can, F being private. Language no that, the point of speaking of things as red or not. one could ever know to apply to anything is no real (Saying that a cheese weighs a kilo is not saying that language at all. So there can be no private language. it will not grow or shrink. Nor is calling something (What is important here is the unavailability to others of at least some of the facts which determine how F is red saying that most people would say so.)
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Private Language to be used—its actual semantics. Private objects play no role.) Here is a second argument. Let Pol judge, 'A is F.' Now ask: in principle, might Pol be wrong in judging this? Might he have mistaken what his own 'is F' required for truth of A, or whether that requirement was satisfied? If not, then his words are reduced to the level of an inarticulate cry. For they must be governed by the rule: they were spoken correctly exactly wherever Pol felt inclined (enough) to speak them. If so, then suppose his words said of A that which is true of A. What might such a fact consist in? Not in Pol's reactions to the words, as exhibited in his judgment. But then, evidently, in nothing else either. (This being private language, only his reactions matter.) Neither of these arguments, one might object, is available to Wittgenstein. Each depends on a principle he explicitly rejects—the first on a rejected epistemology (see, for example Sect. 84); the second on the rejected idea that facts of some genre, to be such, need to consist in anything else. (See, for example, Sects. 135-37.) The objection vanishes, though, when we ask what entitles Wittgenstein to reject these principles. In the first case, for instance, there is normally a distinction between real doubts, which might show you do not know, and merely imaginable doubts, which show nothing. Where such a distinction is drawable, the mere possibility of misremembering what a word means cannot show someone not to know that it has been used correctly. But that distinction rests on a background 'system of natural reactions': we take certain doubts seriously, others not, given which there are facts as to some doubts being real, others not. That background is unavailable in the case of private language. So there can be no appeal there to such a distinction; no such thing as 'the reasonable way of drawing it.' Given such lacunas in the private case, the private linguist lacks the means for resisting either of the otherwise noncompelling arguments. We normally suppose, rightly, that we can tell a hawk from a handsaw; further that if in some case we have failed to, there will be something to show either that we missed some pertinent fact, or that we judged unreasonably. The above argument shows the importance of both suppositions. Without room for something to override our judgments, there would be no judgment. The second supposition is safe just where there are means for drawing a distinction between what is the reasonable view of, or reaction to, a situation, and what is not. A private linguist may seem to have semantic reactions; to take his private language to have one semantics rather than another. Without the resources to distinguish reasonable understandings of it from others, he can in fact be doing no such thing; nor could his language have a semantics, except perhaps that of an inarticulate cry. Those appear to be resources he would lack. Frege encouraged the view that if we could just get words to have the right properties—e.g., to have a proper and univocal sense—then their doing that would settle, effectively, all questions as to how and where the words apply correctly. Such a perfect language, like a perfect machine, would run on forever under its own power; facts as to what bits of it were true would depend in no way on our, or on any, reactions to those bits; the language would have sufficient resources in itself to generate those facts on its own. The illusion that there might be private language rests on the idea of language functioning that way: whether a private word is true of an item depends not at all on anyone else's reactions, and, if the private linguist might be mistaken in such matters, not on his reactions either. Rather, properties intrinsic to the language are conceived as carrying all the weight in determining that the facts about its application are thus. Wittgenstein shows this Fregean ideal for language to be a chimera; no words could have that property. That would be enough to show up private language as an illusion. Conversely, dealing directly with private language is a way of showing why Frege's conception could not be right.
6. Private Language and Rules

Wittgenstein first makes the crucial point about this chimera in his discussion of rules and their requirements (see Sects. 84-7). For any rule, there are various conflicting things, each of which would count as following it correctly, if only this or that understanding of the rule were the right one—the one it in fact bore. We are often capable of seeing what following a rule in a specific case requires. The fact that the rule does require that is not independent of our seeing this. For that fact depends on that understanding of it being the most reasonable one. But in matters of reasonableness, we, or beings like us, must be the ultimate arbiters. It is no good appealing to anything like a rule to fill the gap we would leave at that point. For a word to have properties which, all on their own, decide that it applies correctly to (in) exactly these cases and no others is for it to be governed by a rule that requires it to be applied exactly there. But Wittgenstein's point is that no rule, in isolation, can do that job. For it does that only given sufficient facts as to its proper understanding; but there are no such facts without a background of natural reactions to the rule, by reasonable beings, for those facts to rest on. One way to see the point is to consider language with all such background cut away. Private language is such language. It fails to be genuine language precisely because it lacks such a background. The conception of semantic properties which Wittgenstein's discussion of rules supports thus becomes compulsory. Language in need of no one (for the standards of its correct use) is language for no one. See also: Family Resemblance; Rules; Wittgenstein, Ludwig.
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The notion of representation is a familiar, if philosophically problematic, one. It becomes more problematic, and less familiar, when modified with the epithet 'mental.' Nevertheless, the notion of mental representation is crucial both in cognitive psychology and cognitive science. It is also crucial in linguistics itself, at least for those who accept Chomsky's views that grammars describe part of the contents of the minds of language users, and that linguistics is correctly construed as part of cognitive psychology.
1. Representation and Mental Representation

It is a fundamental assumption of cognitive psychology and cognitive science that explanations of behavior make reference not only to inputs and outputs but to information encoded in the mind. In order to provide an information processing account of a particular ability it is necessary, therefore, to describe how inputs, outputs, and stored information are internally encoded. It is natural to think of these encodings as depending on a mental representation scheme or language. Following Jerry Fodor (1975) this language is usually referred to as the language of thought, though different mental faculties may use different representational schemes. Although this view of mental processing is widely accepted, it raises a very difficult question: what is a mental representation? One can make a start on answering this question by considering everyday types of representation that are easier to understand. A simple two-dimensional town map represents space spatially. In general, however, there need be no such direct correspondence between what is represented and how it is represented. British Ordnance Survey maps represent the third spatial dimension using contour lines, and they represent things in the landscape by symbols that may (church with a tower) or may not (coach station) resemble what they represent. In such a representational
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scheme, the correspondence between what is represented and the elements of the scheme must play a role in both the production and the use of particular representations—only in aberrant cases will it not do so. In particular, resemblance is not sufficient for representation, as a consideration of portraits, particularly those of identical twins, shows. Causation is crucial in determining what something represents. Indeed, some philosophers (e.g., Fodor 1990) have suggested purely causal theories of how a mental state comes to represent something in the world. There is little difficulty understanding how maps work. But maps require people to create and interpret them. We, as mapmakers, create the representational schemes that allow us to make particular maps and, thus, to achieve our navigatory goals. And we, as map users, have the goals that make maps useful. Mental representations differ from maps in both respects. First, the meanings of the elements of a system of mental representation are not arbitrarily stipulated. They arise from natural effects that the environment has on people or animals. However, not every effect that the world has on an animal gives rise to a mental representation. For an effect to be a representation, it must have the function of providing information about what it represents. Second, although natural effects can have representational functions imposed upon them, mental representations typically have functions that derive from the natural goals of people or animals. Furthermore, an account of mental representations cannot be based on the idea of a person inside the head setting them up and using them— homunculus theories cannot explain cognition. If the job of cognitive scientists is to discover the representational schemes used by the mind, that job is very different from a mapmaker's. Mapmakers decide what to represent, taking into account how their maps will be used, and they stipulate a representational

Representation, Mental scheme to encode the relevant information. Depending on the mapmaker's skill, the map may or may not be easy to use. Cognitive scientists have to assess the purpose of a piece of mental apparatus, to postulate a representational scheme that, together with processes to operate on it, satisfies that purpose. Then they must try to find evidence that that scheme is used. This process is a complex one, not only because cognitive scientists cannot look and see what the elements of the representational scheme are, but also because they have to make inferences about processes as well as representations. The representational scheme needed to perform a task depends on what processes act upon the representations allowed by the scheme. The philosopher Fred Dretske (1988) contrasts mental representations with maps by classifying them as a type, indeed the most important type, of natural representation system. He claims that natural representation systems are the source of intentionality in the world. Intentionality is the 'aboutness' which philosophers take to be a defining characteristic of mental phenomena. A map is 'about' the terrain it represents, but only derivatively. Its aboutness derives from the fact that people interpret it as being about a certain part of the world. The aboutness of mental representations is not derivative, and it is for this reason that mental representations are so important and so difficult to understand. It is also for this reason that the study of maps can only take us so far in understanding the concept of mental representation. Dretske analyzes the notion of representation in terms of indication. One thing indicates another if its occurrence provides information about what it indicates. Because of the rich correlational structure of the world, there are many instances of indication. A bear's paw prints in the snow indicate that a bear has passed this way. The ringing of a door bell indicates that someone is at the door (and also, for example, that current is flowing in the door bell's electric circuit). Certain patterns of activity in a person's visual cortex indicate that they have seen a chair (to anyone or anything that can register them). For Dretske, there is no misindication. If signs are misinterpreted, they are being used as representations. An indicator becomes a representation if it is given the function of indicating the state of something else. Now misrepresentation is possible. If a car's fuel gauge jams, it does not really indicate that the tank is full. But since it has been given the function of indicating how much fuel is in the tank, it misrepresents how full it is. Misrepresentation can be a nuisance, or worse. However, the possibility of misrepresentation goes hand in hand with a very useful property of representational schemes: their elements can be recombined at will. Maps of imaginary countries can be drawn. I can mentally represent not only what the world is like, but how I want it to be, how I think you falsely believe it to be, and so on. Thus, although natural systems of representation derive from natural indicators of things in the real world, particular representations can be decoupled from the world. They need not be caused by what they represent.
2. Neural Substrates and Connectionism

Cognitive scientists assume that the mind is a mechanism, in the very general Turing machine sense, and that its physical substrate is the brain. Thus, every mental state is associated with a corresponding brain state. If that mental state is a complex representational one, each element of the representation is associated with some aspect of that brain state. For most of our cognitive abilities, no more can be said at present. It is not even known whether equivalent mental states are always associated with the same brain state. And even when a good deal is known about the underlying neural substrate—as in the case of low-level visual processing, for example—it has been argued (e.g., by David Marr 1982) that questions about representational schemes and the processes that act on them can often be addressed independently of questions about neural substrates, via an information processing analysis of the relevant ability. It is, of course, possible to take a purely functionalist approach to cognition in general and to mental representations in particular. Functionalism holds that the correct, or best, theory of a particular mental ability is the one that best explains the psychological data. The mental representations people use are the ones postulated in that theory. On one interpretation this view is vacuous, because the decision about which explanation is best may be influenced by nonpsychological factors, such as compatibility with what is known about brain structure. On another interpretation functionalism is a substantive, though almost certainly false, doctrine. On this interpretation, considerations about brain structure are irrelevant to choosing the best psychological theory. Since about 1980 the substantive version of functionalism has been challenged by people working in the parallel distributed processing (PDF) or connectionist framework. Connectionists attempt to reproduce human behavior using networks of simple processing elements whose properties resemble those of brain cells or clusters of them. The behavior of a connectionist machine may suggest that it is following a set of rules (couched in a language of thought). However, nothing in the machine corresponds to the rules in the way that a piece of code in a traditional computer model of the mind does. The correct interpretation of connectionist models has been a matter of intense debate. It is known that connectionist machines can simulate traditional serial computers (von Neumann machines), just as von Neumann machines can simulate connectionist machines. However, connectionist machines as they are used in
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Language and Mind cognitive modeling do not perform such simulations. How should such machines be described? On one view they do not contain representations of the rules they appear to be following. Rules are traditionally represented symbolically, and connectionism has been described as a subsymbolic approach to cognition. A contrasting view is that connectionist machines represent rules indirectly, and usually in a distributed fashion. Trying to decide which account is correct is complicated by the fact that many connectionist machines do not exactly follow the rules that their designers wanted them to, so it is not surprising that they do not represent those rules. In one famous example, a network was trained to produce the past tenses of English verbs from their stem forms (Rumelhart and McClelland 1986). However, a detailed analysis of the performance of the machine (Pinker and Prince 1988) showed its knowledge to be lacking in many respects. In particular, it had not encoded the fact there are no phonological conditions on whether the regular (-ed) rule can be applied. Some connectionist systems do follow (usually much simpler) sets of rules exactly, and properties of their (matrix algebra) descriptions may correspond to information that one would intuitively want to say is represented in the system. However, this representation is not so obvious as a traditional symbolic one. So connectionist machines raise in an acute form the question of when information is represented explicitly and when implicitly. The contrast between implicit and explicit representation can be illustrated with a simple example from semantic memory. Sparrows are represented as a subclass of birds. Birds are represented as being able to fly, unless there is specific information to the contrary. There is no specific information that sparrows cannot fly. From the explicitly encoded information it can, therefore, be inferred that sparrows can fly—that information is implicitly represented. Whether information is encoded explicitly or implicitly determines how easily a particular task can be performed. Implicit information should take longer to compute than explicit information takes to retrieve. It may appear from this example that the contrast between explicit and implicit representation is a clear one. However, it is not, as the questions raised by representation in connectionist networks show. Indeed, although the contrast between implicit and explicit representation has become increasingly important recently, it remains unclear whether there is one distinction or several. Although connectionist machines raise important questions about how mechanisms encode rules and follow them, their existence in no way bears upon the very difficult philosophical questions about rule following raised by Wittgenstein (1953), which have sometimes been taken to challenge Chomsky's (e.g., 1972) idea of linguistic rules in the mind. The description of a connection machine (or, for that matter, a von Neumann machine) as following a rule is part of a description of its behavior by us. Wittgenstein's questions about how people follow rules turn into questions about what we, as cognitive scientists expect of a machine that we describe as following a certain set of rules. It does not matter whether those rules are encoded explicitly, or only implicitly. See also: Intentionality.
Bibliography Chomsky N 1972 Language and Mind. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York Dretske F 1988 Explaining Behavior: Reasons in a World of Causes. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Fodor J A 1975 The Language of Thought. Crowell, New York Fodor J A 1990 A Theory of Content and Other Essays. MIT Press/Bradford Books, Cambridge, MA Marr D 1982 Vision: A Computational Investigation into the Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information. Freeman, San Francisco, CA Pinker S, Prince A 1988 On language and connectionism: Analysis of a parallel distributed processing model of language acquisition. Cognition 28:73-193 Rumelhart D E, McClelland J L 1986 On learning the past tenses of English verbs. In: McClelland J L, Rumelhart D E, et al. Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition. Vol. 2: Psychological and Biological Models. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Wittgenstein L 1953 Philosophical Investigations (trans. Anscombe G E M). Blackwell, Oxford

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
O. Werner

1. Statement of the Hypothesis

The relationship between language and culture, or language and world view, has been noted at least since Wilhelm von Humboldt (1836). But discussion
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remained relatively dormant until the 'Golden Age of Native American Indian Linguistics' in the first half of the twentieth century. Although everyone calls it the Sapir-Whorf hypoth-

Sapir- Whorf Hypothesis esis, its most persistent proponent was Whorf (Carroll 1956). And yet, perhaps surprisingly, the most popular formulation comes from Sapir. 1.1 Sapir's, or the Lexical, Version Sapir never sought the interface between language and culture anywhere but in the lexicon. The quote below is used most commonly to characterize the SapirWhorf hypothesis:
Human beings do not live in the objective world alone... but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached. (Sapir in Mandelbaum 1963: 162, emphasis added) than simply language, i.e., than the language patterns themselves. (Whorf in Carroll 1956: 147)

(following the usage of the times one can equate 'language patterns' with grammar), and again:
... the background linguistic system (in other words the grammar) of each language is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas but rather is itself the shaper of ideas, the program and guide for the individual's mental activity, for his analysis of impression, for his synthesis of his mental stock in trade. (Whorf in Carroll 1956: 212)

Finally, in the statements in which Whorf gives the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis its alternate name, he again sees the relationship of language and culture in grammar:
... the 'linguistic relativity principle,' which means, in informal terms, that users of markedly different grammars are pointed in different evaluations of externally similar acts of observations, and hence are not equivalent as observers but must arrive at somewhat different views of the world. (Whorf in Carroll 1956: 221)

A similar statement stressing the classificatory or categorizing nature of language is expressed in even stronger terms by Whorf (though this quote is seldom used to characterize the hypothesis):
We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face... (Whorf in Carroll 1956: 213)

Both quotes emphasize the words or lexical resources of a language. That is, both stress that while nature is continuous human beings cut nature into discrete categories and each culture does this cutting somewhat differently. People make up words or concepts in order to talk about their world or cultural universe. This version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is one of two alternatives. It is called the lexical version in this article. While one could ascribe the 'anomaly' that the hypothesis is usually characterized by the first, or Sapir's, quote to some historical accident, there seem to exist deeper reasons that will soon become apparent. 1.2 Whorf s, or the Grammatical, Version The view expressed by Whorf in the second quote (above) is relatively unusual. He searched for the interface between language and culture beyond the vocabulary (or the lexicon) and sought to discover the roots of cultural regularities in a language's grammar:
... the grammar of Hopi bore a relation to Hopi culture, and the grammar of European tongues to our own 'Western' or 'European' culture. (Whorf 1939:73)

These quotes represent the second way of interpreting the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis—the grammatical version.
1.3 Discussion

(The Hopi Indians live in villages in Arizona and speak a language of the Uto-Aztecan language family), and:
By 'habitual thought' and 'thought world' I mean more

The two versions of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or the 'linguistic relativity principle,' namely, the lexical version, espoused by Edward Sapir, and the grammatical, the predominant view of Benjamin Lee Whorf, have created considerable mischief in the profession. The reasons for the confusion lie in the different definitions of language used by anthropologists and linguists. To anthropologists it was self-evident that the lexical resources of a language are part of that language. Therefore, the anthropological definition of language, at least implicitly, consists of phonology, grammar (syntax), and the lexicon. The definition of language used by linguists explicitly excludes the lexicon. To this day linguists tend to give the lexicon short shrift. The science of linguistics considers only the structured parts of language amenable to analysis. One can easily detect pattern (i.e., structure) in phonology and in grammar (syntax). The lexicon was perceived as a 'collection of idiosyncratic features' (Gleason 1962), therefore not amenable to scientific analysis, and therefore outside of linguistics proper and, in the end, outside of what linguists considered to be language (perhaps best stated as 'language is what linguists do'). H. A. Gleason summarizes this view: 'lexicography is something that cannot be done but must be done.' Several conferences about the hypothesis in the 1950s (Hoijer 1954; Hymes 1960; McQuown 1960)
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Language and Mind remained strangely inconclusive, largely because participating anthropologists and linguists operated with a basic misunderstanding about the nature of language. These conferences demonstrated vividly Kuhn's (1970) notion that discussions between members subscribing to two different scientific paradigms (views of the world) are always inconclusive. The irony of these discussions is that they are about language and world view, though Kuhn (ibid.) demonstrates that all world view disputes are hampered by the same sounding words used with different senses (e.g., 'language' as used by linguists versus anthropologists). The Sapirean formulation of the hypothesis gained wide acceptance. The influence of grammar on world view was difficult to demonstrate. Whorf's exotic interpretations of Hopi thought were often attributed to his imaginative native consultant (Carl F. Voegelin, personal communication). (Most of Voegelin's later work, with Florence M. Voegelin, dealt with the Hopi Indian language and culture, e.g., Voegelin and Voegelin 1957.) Meanwhile the basic linguistic attitude changed from an orientation that 'every language must be described in its own terms' (the structuralist paradigm) to a preoccupation with language universals ushered in by Chomsky's transformational/generative revolution in linguistics. Suddenly all languages looked very similar. Many more or less serious statements were made to this effect. Robert E. Lees is credited with asserting that 'all languages are dialects of English.' A few years later James McCauley 'corrected' Lees's assertion by declaring that 'all languages are dialects of Japanese.' McCauley's remark was prompted by the surface structure of Japanese which appeared to be very close to a universal, hypothetical deep structure valid for all languages. The interdependence of a culture and the lexicon that speakers associate with that culture to talk about their experiences seems almost obvious—especially to anthropologists. The validity of the hypothesis was, of course, of much greater interest to anthropologists than to linguists and found, concurrent with the Chomskyan revolution but independent of it, expression in the New Ethnography (Sect. 3). In 1970 Oswald Werner demonstrated that the contribution of grammar to world view can only take place through grammatical categories. However, grammatical categories are, in the prevailing theories of linguistics, inherently part of the lexicon—specifically of lexical entries. In transformationalist theories of language these lexical entries are in the semantic component of the grammar of specific languages. Each entry of the form (C, P) has a conceptual part C—a representation of the 'meaning'—and a phonological part P—representing directions for pronouncing the entry. Therefore, the 'linguistic relativity principle' becomes an investigation of the relationship
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between a culture and its associated lexicon—including grammatical categories. It may be useful to recapitulate briefly Werner's argument. His demonstration starts with the Chomskyan assumption that the parts of a grammar are known and can be represented by the formula (1):
G(#,'

>,S,V n l ,V t )

(1)

where the # symbol represents the boundary conditions of a sentence (or utterance). This is the silence (absence of speech) that precedes and follows every sentence. The symbol stands for the operation of concatenation. The rewrite symbol -» (right arrow) stands for the rewrite operation that specifies structure, for example, the formula (2): S -> NP~VP (2) (read: 'rewrite sentence as consisting of a noun phrase followed by a verb phrase') specifies the structure of S, the sentence, that consists of a noun phrase followed by a verb phrase. Thus, S in (1) stands for sentence, Vnt for the nonterminal vocabulary of the grammar, such as NP and VP in (2), and V, for the terminal vocabulary. These lowest level units of a grammar or grammatical categories have no further structure (no rewrite rules can be applied and therefore these symbols never appear on the left side of any rewrite rules). In the process of sentence generation or production, actual lexical entries replace terminal vocabulary items in each language in question. (For details on the rules governing lexical insertion into terminal grammatical categories see the publications of Noam Chomsky.) Typical terminal categories are 'mass noun,' 'count noun,' 'performative verb,' 'manner adverbial,' 'definite article,' etc. Obviously, #, , and -* are part of the formalism of all grammars, hence language universals, and cannot therefore contribute to meaning and world view. The high level nonterminal vocabulary Vnt are assumed by linguists to be also universal, that is, they occur in every language and cannot therefore influence language specific world views. Languages such as Nootka (one of a large number of languages spoken on the northwest coast of the USA) which consists almost entirely of verbs, and Sierra Miwok (one of a large number of languages spoken in the state of California), which consists almost entirely of nouns, can be made to conform naturally to the structure of noun phrases and verb phrases. In Nootka nouns are formed by nominalizing verbs (English analogue: to walk—to take a walk) and in Sierra Miwok verbs are formed by verbalizing nouns (English analogue: table—to table, e.g., a motion). The above argument leaves only the low level nonterminal (Vnt) and the terminal (V,)—the lowest level of grammatical categories of a given language—as potential contributors to language specific aspects of world view.

Sapir- Whorf Hypothesis If M. A. K. Halliday's principle of'delicacy' is now added, that states that when the limit of linguistic analysis (the ultimate delicacy) is reached, then every lexical item in every language represents its very own unique grammatical category. The parts of grammar that could contribute to world view are therefore the low level nonterminal and the terminal grammatical categories. But since these are part of the lexicon, in any language, the interaction of language and culture must be seen as firmly rooted in the lexicon. Ultimately, therefore, the Sapirean definitions and the definition of the hypothesis in Whorf's first quote of this article prevail. In the other, the Whorfian formulation, every time he mentions 'grammar,' or 'pattern,' these terms should be read as standing for 'low level grammatical categories,' or 'language specific grammatical categories.'
2. The Contribution of Grammatical and Lexical Categories are, in their lexicon—that is, in conceptual and grammatical categories—the greater their tendency to embody different world views.

Before examining the issue of how these language specific categories contribute to world view, two additional notions require discussion: the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, according to which language determines thought, and the weak version, which asserts that language has a tendency to influence thought. Whorf is often viewed as representing the strong version. However, a review of his quotes (for example, in Sect. 1.2) reveals that he always qualifies his assertions. While Whorf does say that speakers of different languages 'must arrive' at different interpretations of the world, these interpretations are not totally different only 'somewhat different' (Whorf in Carroll 1956: 221). Hopi grammar does not determine Hopi culture only 'bore a relation to [it]' (Whorf 1939: 73). And the 'background linguistic system' is not a determiner of ideas but merely a 'shaper of ideas.' He talks about 'habitual thought' rather than thought fully determined by the language of the speakers. It is thus difficult to find representatives of the strong version of the hypothesis. All other points of view, including Whorf's, represent relatively stronger or relatively weaker versions of the weak version of the cultural relativity principle. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis can therefore be paraphrased as follows:
The categorial system of every language, including lower level grammatical and all lexical categories, points its speakers toward somewhat different evaluations of externally similar observations. Hence speakers of different languages have somewhat different views of the world, somewhat different habitual thought, and consequently their language and cultural knowledge are in a somewhat different relationship to each other. They don't live in the same world with different labels attached but in somewhat different worlds. The more dissimilar two languages

Finally, Whorf's search for traces of world view in grammar, or in grammatical categories, is not without merit considering that different parts of language tend to change at different rates. Thus lexical items referring to objects change fastest as technology and customs change. For example, in Anglo-American culture new words like 'jeep,' 'radar,' 'laser,' 'napalm,' 'frozen yogurt,' 'yuppie,' and many others are quickly adopted into everyday use. Verbs change more slowly. For example, until 1957 only planets, comets, and meteorites could orbit. Since Sputnik, the Soviet Union's first artificial satellite, an assortment of objects propelled into space are in orbit. A few years ago a telescope could not be thought of as orbiting. However, with the Hubble Deep Space Telescope in orbit, the range of the verb has been extended even to human beings. For example almost everyone understands the sentence The astronauts are orbiting the earth. There are other verbs introduced or extended by the rapid changes in Anglo-American culture. For example, / word processed all morning; This program is good at error trapping, etc. Not too surprisingly, new verbs are harder to think of than new nouns. Still rarer are examples of changes in low level grammatical categories. These aspects of language change slowest and have therefore a much more lasting influence on 'habitual thought.' In the following sections the amended definition of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (above) is used to explain a number of anomalies in the relationship between language and culture. 2.1 The Role of Different Symbol Systems This amended definition still contains some mystification, for example, the dilemma of how it is that different categorial systems, that is, different languages, lead to somewhat different world views. The insight that the choice of a symbol system is crucial to the solution of a mathematical problem is attributed to the Hungarian mathematician George Polya. A solution may be easy, difficult, or impossible depending on how a problem solver symbolizes the problem. Though mathematical problems are hardly identical with human problems for which language may provide a symbolization, mathematical problems display many similarities to such problems. Language provides human beings with categories of thought (see Lucy and Shweder 1979, below); these may or may not facilitate thinking in a given cultural domain. It is clear from the Ethnoscience movement of the 1960s and 70s that speakers of different languages often do classify things very differently. For example, the Navajo Indians classify the plant world as in Fig. 1.
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Language and Mind 2.2 Language and Culture do not Covary The perfect correlation of different cultures speaking different languages was an artifact of the biases of early cultural anthropology. In the formative years of the profession each ethnographer selected his or her own tribe with a distinct language. Nevertheless, anomalies to language/culture homogeneity were soon noted. Three small tribes in Northern California represent the paradigm case. The Yurok, Karok, and Hupa Indians (the Yurok language is distantly related to the Algonquian, Karok to the Siouxan, and Hupa to the Figure 1. Navajo classification of plants. The T's symbolize Na-Dene (Athabascan) language family) in the Klathe taxonomic relationship, e.g., hash nanise' at'e, or 'A math and Trinity river valleys near the CaliforniaOregon border speak three different languages belongcactus is a (kind of) plant/ ing to three different language families, yet their cultures are almost identical. The linguistic record is incomplete, but there is eviIt is clear from Fig. 1 that Navajos use different dence that many lexical categories (and possibly gramcriteria for classifying plants than do speakers of matical categories) were converging in the three English. Strangely, in Navajo—with about 500 named languages. For example, all three use the phrase 'fish plants—no further subdivisions of even the largest eater' for naming the sea otter. There is growing evidence that extensive language class of flexible plants seem to exist. and cultural leveling appears in areas where speakers However, alternate classifications do exist. One Navajo medicine man classified all plants according of very different languages live in close proximity and to their use. The surprise was a subclass of dangerous in intimate contact with each other. For example, plants that were poisonous. However an even greater on the border of the Indo-European and Dravidian surprise was that each dangerous plant has an antidote languages of India there are communities where vocabulary and grammar of the two languages (Marplant that can undo the effect of the poison. One more unusual example showing that a language athi, Indo-European and Kannada, Dravidian) concan facilitate talk (and solutions?) on some topics: the verge to such a high degree that people do seem to Navajo language has a rich vocabulary for describing live in an almost identical world with different labels the 'behavior' of lines. I list half a dozen examples attached (Gumperz 1971). In other words, very different languages can, over from a growing corpus of about one hundred: time, under the influence of their converging cultures, level many of their differences, while similar languages dzigai a white line running off into distance may diverge over time if their cultures are developing (infinity) adziisgai a group of parallel white lines running in different directions. off into distance Examples of the latter case are the Apachean hadziisgai a white line running vertically upward languages of the southwest USA. The Navajo Indian from the bottom to the top of an object language, in the Apachean group, accommodates a aheehesgai more than two white lines form culture that incorporates many Puebloan traits into concentric circles its world view. None of the Apachean-speaking tribes atch'inidzigai two white lines coming together to a live in villages. The Puebloan villagers have relatively point homogeneous cultures but speak a diversity of amanagah a white line zigzagging back and forth languages. The other Apacheans did not assimilate The ease with which Navajos talk about the behavior Puebloan elements into their culture. Navajo and the of white and other colored lines is amazing. This other Apachean languages do remain similar, but the facility with 'geometry' is perhaps explainable by Navajos use extensive specialized vocabularies (and Navajo names or descriptions of features of the land- folk theories) appropriate to their world view that is scape that rarely utilize similarities to everyday objects alien to the other Apacheans. (e.g., Hat Rock). Instead Navajos use geometrical description of verticals, horizontals, lines, and points. 2.3 Language Mixing For example, a rock formation near Tuba City, Bilinguals when in each other's company tend to mix Arizona, called by Navajos Tse Ahe'ii'dha, 'two rocks languages. The reasons seem obvious. There are many standing vertically parallel in a reciprocal relation- things that can be said better, more efficiently, in an ship to each other' was named by English speakers aesthetically more pleasing manner, in one language than in another. Language purity is usually main'Elephant's Feet.'
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Sapir- Whorf Hypothesis
tained only in the presence of (especially) high status monolinguals who would consider mixing the discourse with an unknown language offensive. Language mixing, a universal occurrence when bilinguals converse, provides a good indicator of the utility of the idioms or technical vocabulary of one language over another. That is, different languages offer different (more or less elegant?) solutions to speech about the same or similar 'cultural things.' 2.4 Language Acquisition Since all definitions of culture stress that culture includes all things '... acquired [learned] by man as a member of society' (Tylor 1958), any language learned by children belongs therefore within culture. This fact underlies the formulation of the relationship as 'language in culture.' However, many scholars became concerned that language is not just 'in culture' or 'part of culture,' but is also the major vehicle for the acquisition of culture. The confusion of culture with its chief vehicle of transmission proved troublesome, particularly since language is held responsible for the cumulativeness of culture. That is, language makes possible not only the transmission of culture, but also the increase of culture from generation to generation. This cumulativeness through language is the major mechanism of cultural evolution. The solution, while 'obvious' in light of the developments of cognitive anthropology (Ethnoscience and New Ethnography are near synonyms) was nevertheless never clearly formulated. Only one additional assumption need be made: the acquisition of language by a child has a natural history and in the course of this development language changes its function. At first the child learns its native language 'as a member of society' and therefore following the standard definitions of culture, language is part of culture. However, there is more to it. Language acquisition specialists agree that language learning is complete by the age of 4-6 years. Formal education, the institutionalized commencement of the acquisition of culture through language, begins after the child fully masters its native language. This happens universally at the age of 5 or 6 years. The child has now completed learning those aspects of culture that do not require language and begins to learn the accumulated wisdom and technology of the social group in which it is growing up, and that is encoded in language. Through language the child learns the verbalizable aspects of his or her culture. The function of language has shifted, now culture is in language, or it is acquired through language.
3. Cognitive Anthropology and the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

The New Ethnography or Ethnoscience entered anthropology with two papers published in Language

by Floyd Lounsbury (1956) and his student Ward Goodenough (1956). The topic was a componential analysis of the Pawnee (which belongs to the Cadoan language family and was spoken in the southern Great Plains) and the Trukese (Austronesian-speaking Micronesians) kinship systems. The point of componential analysis, in the context of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, is that kinship terminology or the kinship lexicon of every language/ culture combination views the same kinship space, but tends to subdivide it differently. The examples of kinship terminologies confirm the 'linguistic relativity principle.' Speakers of languages in different cultures experience the same 'objective reality' but assign different terminology to it. The speakers of different languages lexicalize (set to words) the universal kinship space very differently. For example, the Yankee kinship system used by English-speaking North Americans merges all cousins: most Americans no longer fully understand the terminology that classifies cousins by degree (first, second,... cousin) based on the distance from a common ancestor (first cousin = two generations, i.e., shared grandparents, etc.) and by generational distance (once, twice,... removed). For example, Tagalog, the main language of the Philippines, makes no distinction between grandparents and grandparents' brothers and sisters. Crow and Omaha, both Siouxan languages spoken in the Great Plains, merge some of the terms for cousins with certain aunts or uncles. Since the Crow reckon descent through the maternal line (they are matrilineal) and the Omaha through the paternal line (they are patrilineal) the two systems are mirror images of each other. Navajo and Hungarian, a Finno-Ugric language of central Europe, on the other hand, make a careful distinction between the relative age of brothers and sisters. The list of culturally prescribed differences in kinship terminologies is virtually endless. Componential analysis was soon followed by the discovery of folk taxonomies. Folk classifications had been noted before (e.g., Mauss 1964) but this was the first time that anthropologists/ethnographers collected folk taxonomies systematically. The seminal monograph was Conklin's Hanuno'o Agriculture (1954; the Hanuno'o are Austronesian speakers living on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines). A flurry of activity followed taxonomizing everything from ethno-anatomies to folk zoologies. Werner, et al. (1983) even presented the taxonomic aspects of the entire traditional Navajo universe. In this lively debate the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was mentioned only rarely and often outside the context of the New Ethnography. The participants in this ferment tacitly assumed that componential analysis and folk taxonomies clearly demonstrate the weak lexical version of the hypothesis. Out of these developments arose cognitive anthro81

Language and Mind by Berlin and Kay and that the weak Sapir-Whorfian lexical formulation corresponds more closely to the facts. Willet Kempton extended the methodology of cognitive anthropology to the shapes of objects, thus exploring the boundary between categories. Cecil Brown applied the evolutionary idea in Fig. 2 to other aspects of human vocabularies, especially botanical and zoological terminologies. Ethnographers soon expanded their view beyond componential analysis after it was shown by a number of anthropologists and linguists that components are also lexical items and hence most often language specific rather than universal. John Lyons's critique of componential analysis as a universal theory for cultural knowledge (and semantics) is devastating. Nevertheless, componential analysis remains a superb tool for understanding exotic kinship terminologies. In 1970 Casagrande and Hale, who had collected a large number of folk definitions in Papago (an UtoAztecan language of southern Arizona) published 13 lexical/semantic relations. They failed to find examples of a postulated 14th, the part/whole relation. A close analysis of their data shows that the part/whole relation did appear in its inverse form: that is, instead of 'A is a part of B' they found and classified as a spatial relation the inverse 'B has an A.' Casagrande and Hale's work was seminal for a number of researchers (see the summary in Evens, et al. 1980). Through these scholars their work was linked to the cognitive sciences. However, this link did not develop into strong ties. The major insight of field theory can again be framed in terms of the linguistic relativity principle: the weak lexical version is accepted as self-evident. The lexical/semantic fields of the languages used in different cultural contexts look very different. However, there is unity because the lexical/semantic fields are held together by universal lexical/semantic relations. Unfortunately there is no agreement on the basic set of lexical/semantic relations which range from Werner's (Werner and Schoepfle 1987) two to the over 50 lexical relations of Apresyian, et al. (1970). Werner's two relations are 'taxonomy' and 'modification' plus several derived complex relations, a relation for sequential phenomena, and logical relations, including modal logic. Apresyian, et al.'s relations are derived from practical lexicography or the construction of more systematic dictionaries. For example, their relation EQUIP is the relation in 'ship' EQUIP 'crew' ('A crew operates a ship'). The folk taxonomic model can be applied to whole cultures. Closely related encyclopedic works display the lexical and cultural knowledge dimensions of a culture. That is, a background document fully exploring the lexical resources of a language represents an important aspect of the culture as a whole.

Figure 2. The cultural evolution of color terminology. If a language has the term 'red,' then it also has 'black' and 'white'; if a language has the term 'green' and 'yellow,' then it also has 'red,' 'white,' and 'black,' etc. The more technologically developed a given culture, the more of the 11 basic color terms are in use. (In the third box either order of [green < yellow] or [yellow < green] is possible).

pology that took as its goal the investigation of human cognition, especially cultural knowledge. It soon developed two branches. One is ethnoscience ethnography, which tacitly assumes the validity of the weak lexical form of linguistic relativity but does not elaborate this link to the past. The more pressing task is seen as the perfection and systematization of ethnography. The second branch moved closer to cognitive psychology and by that route to cognitive science. Berlin and Kay (1969) soon emerged as the leaders in this field with their work on color terminology. That different language/culture groups have different color terminologies was considered in the debates of the 1950s and early 1960s the prime example of the lexical version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Obviously, the color spectrum is a continuum of colors from red to purple, but human beings in different parts of the world partition this continuum differently. Berlin and Kay's first important discovery was that the color spectrum is not a good example for the hypothesis. '[C]olor categorization is not random and the foci of basic color terms are similar in all languages' (Berlin and Kay 1969: 10) and '... the eleven (see Fig. 2) basic color categories are panhuman perceptual universals' (Berlin and Kay 1969: 109). However, Berlin and Kay (1969: 160 n.2) stress that their work should not be confused with a thorough study of the ethnographic ramifications of color terminology. That is,'... to appreciate the full cultural significance of color words it is necessary to appreciate the full range of meanings, both referential and connotative ...' or the lexical/semantic fields in which individual color terms are embedded. Their second discovery was that color terminology evolves in a very lawful sequence. Although their formula has been 'fine tuned' following new crosscultural data, it can be represented as shown in Figure 2 (their original formulation, 1969: 4). Lucy and Shweder (1979) revived the controversy by showing in several well-designed experiments that color memory is highly sensitive to the lexical resources of a language and culture. They conclude that the universality of color categories is overstated
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The choice of the symbol system (e.g., language) affects the ease or difficulty with which one can talk about particular domains of cultural reality and solve problems in them. Thus the lexicon of language does provide a loosely laced straitjacket for thinking because it limits individuals to customary categories of thought. Only in this sense does it constrain thought. At the same time language allows the inventive human mind to create alternative categorizations for solving new problems. The history of science and the rich diversity of thousands of human languages and cultures attests to the inventiveness of the human spirit. True, the combinatorial possibilities in human language are enormous. Thus the very use of language results in a drift of meanings and with it inadvertent changes in world view. This process is analogous to genetic drift. But in addition there are analogues and historical examples of meaning mutations: conceptual revolutions and conversions. However, these escapes from the mold of one's habitual language patterns are never easy—'... anomaly is recognized only with difficulty' (Kuhn 1970). It usually takes genius to show the rest of humanity how to see the world in a new light, that is in new categories. In such conversion experiences the language is affected 'to the core' (Kuhn 1970)— specifically, most grammatical categories remain the same but geniuses revamp lexical categories in ways that facilitate new thought which the rest of humanity may in time follow. See also: Thought and Language.
Bibliography Apresyian Y D, Mel'cuk I A, 2olkovsky A K 1970 Semantics and lexicography: Toward a new type of unilingual dictionary. In: Kiefer F (ed.) Studies in Syntax and Semantics. Reidel, Dordrecht

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Language and Mind

Shared Knowledge
J. K. Gundel

'Shared knowledge' is one of a number of different terms (such as presupposition, given information, background information, common ground) which have been used to refer to the knowledge, beliefs, and/or discourse entities common to both speaker and addressee. Shared knowledge may be based on general cultural knowledge shared by all members of the same speech community or on more specific experiences shared by speech participants, including information derived from the immediate physical environment and preceding utterances in the discourse. While there is some question as to whether 'shared knowledge' is the most appropriate term for describing the phenomenon at issue here, or indeed whether there is a unitary phenomenon involved here at all, it is clear that assumptions about what is shared by the speaker and addressee in a discourse are involved in both the production and interpretation of natural language utterances. Shared knowledge plays a crucial role in resolving ambiguity, in the appropriate use of specific linguistic constructions, and in defining general conditions for successful communication (e.g., knowledge of the language itself and of appropriateness conditions for the performance of various illocutionary acts such as requesting or promising). 1. What is Shared—Knowledge or Beliefs, Propositions or Entities? The term 'knowledge' implies knowledge of some fact. As a condition for successful communication, however, what is crucial is not whether a particular proposition actually is true, but whether it is believed to be true by the participants in a discourse. This suggests that shared knowledge is a pragmatic relation holding between language users and their beliefs about the world. Sperber and Wilson (1995) define an even weaker notion of 'mutual manifestness' which includes not only what speech participants believe, but what they are capable of believing. Others have argued that truth is not a factor here at all, since what is shared is not a proposition, but rather familiarity with some entity (cf. Prince 1981). A number of problems associated with the notion of shared knowledge disappear on this latter view. These include the fact that something can be assumed for the purpose of conversation even though none of the speech participants believes it to be true, as well as the fact that shared knowledge is not necessarily associated with certain constructions in all contexts (see Gundel 1985). 2. How is Knowledge Shared? The Problem of Infinite Regress It has been suggested that in order for speaker and hearer to know which assumptions they share, they
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must make higher order assumptions about these assumptions. Thus, in order for successful communication to take place, it is not only necessary that both speaker and hearer know some proposition (p), but that each knows that the other knows that p and that each knows that the other knows that he/she knows that p, and so on ad infinitum. Shared knowledge of this infinitely regressive sort was termed 'mutual knowledge' by Schiffer (1972). Since the mutual knowledge requirement is unrealistic from a processing point of view, Clark and Marshall (1981) propose that such knowledge is not a reality but 'an ideal people strive for because they will want to avoid misunderstanding whenever possible' (p. 27). Speech participants will thus behave as if they have mutual knowledge, even though they cannot conclusively establish its existence. Sperber and Wilson (1995) argue, on the other hand, that 'there is no indication that any particular striving after mutual knowledge goes on' (p. 19) and that 'mutual knowledge is a philosopher's construct with no close counterpart in reality' (p. 38). They propose that their own concept of 'mutual manifestness' is not open to the same psychological objections as mutual knowledge, since a claim that an assumption is mutually manifest is not a claim about actual mental states or processes.
3. Degrees of Shared Knowledge: One Phenomenon or Many?

The concept of shared knowledge is crucial in describing appropriateness conditions for a number of constructions across languages. These include definite reference, focus and topic constructions, cleft sentences, contrastive stress, and pronominal forms. The type or degree of shared knowledge which is required, however, may differ from one construction to another. For example, the demonstrative determiner that in That cake we had was good is appropriate only if the referent of the noun phrase which contains it is familiar to both speaker and addressee. On the other hand, appropriate use of a demonstrative pronoun like that in That was good requires not only that the referent be known or familiar, but that it be present in the immediate linguistic or extralinguistic context. And the referent of an unstressed personal pronoun like it in It was good requires that the speaker's attention actually be focused on the referent at the current point in the discourse. In order to account for such facts, it is necessary to distinguish different ways in which knowledge can be shared. Much of the current research on shared knowledge is devoted to the question of how many different degrees of knowledge need

There are two themes to this article. First, that thinking involves mental operations or 'representations.' Representations may be of the real world—how to tie a shoelace, the layout of a supermarket, Chomsky's current views on transformations—or of fictional or hypothetical worlds—Hedda Gabler's motivations; what I would do if I were Prime Minister. Successful thinking involves manipulating these representations: planning an efficient route round the supermarket; deciding who would be Chancellor of the Exchequer in my hypothetical government. It should be clear from these examples that representations are necessary: without them we would live in a here-and-now world with an overlay of habits derived from past experience, where no planning is possible beyond overt trial and error. It should also be clear that by no means all representations are readily described by language, spatial representations being an obvious example. The success of preverbal human infants and nonverbal animals in solving spatial problems is a straightforward indication that thought can exist without language. Nonetheless language is a very powerful and flexible medium for creating representations, and this is where one should look for its influence on thought. The second theme is that there is a progression from immediate reactions to the world (catching a ball that has been thrown towards one) to reflections about the world (remembering catching a ball yesterday, coaching someone in catching balls, writing a treatise on ballistics). The more immediate the task the more likely it is that the representations will be determined by external nonlinguistic factors (space, gravity); the more reflective tasks will show greater propensity for

language to play an important role in the representation. These points may seem obvious, but in the history of discussions about language and thought they have often been ignored.
1. History

The prime difficulty in discussing the relationship between language and thought is being forced to use language to describe this relationship: in particular, by attempting to summarize thoughts in some form of words it is but a short (and erroneous) step to assuming that a thought and a verbal summary of it are the same thing. This tendency pervades European thought of the last few centuries. Thus the influential Port Royal grammar of 1660 examines different mental operations and identifies them with different grammatical devices: prepositional judgments with the subject-predicate structure of simple sentences; interrogation with the various syntactic devices for asking questions, etc. (see Chomsky 1966). From a more general perspective, Jenisch, in a prizewinning essay of 1796 (cited in Jespersen 1922), identifies national stereotypes and their language:
In language the whole intellectual and moral essence of a man is to some extent revealed... As the Greek was subtle in thought and sensuously refined in feeling, as the Roman was serious and practical rather than speculative, as the Frenchman is popular and sociable, as the Briton is profound and the German philosophic, so are also the languages of each of these nations. (Jespersen 1922:30)

Sentiments such as these are part of a tradition developed in the nineteenth century by Wilhelm von
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Language and Mind Humboldt and in the twentieth century by Edward Sapir, greatly influenced by the study of non-European languages, and culminating in the work of Benjamin Lee Whorf: this viewpoint has been called 'linguistic relativity'. In Whorf's words:
We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way—an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. (Whorf 1956:213)

Whorf gave lexical examples (the familiar assertion that American Eskimoes have more words than Europeans for snow) and syntactic examples of the differences between languages which he claimed reflected differences in thought. Thus the Hopi, lacking in their language a system of tenses similar to English past, present, and future, would also lack English notions of time and velocity. For Whorf, similarities of grammatical structure necessarily led to similarities of conceptual structure:
The English sentences 'I push his head back' [in Shawnee ni-kwaskwi-tepe-n-a] and 'I drop it in water and it floats' [Shawnee ni-kwask-ho-to] are unlike. But in Shawnee the corresponding statements are closely similar, emphasizing the fact that analysis of nature and classification of events as like or in the same category (logic) are governed by grammar. (Whorf 1956:235)

What all these examples, from Port Royal to Whorf, lack is any assessment of thought processes independent of their expression in language. How does one know that the propositions used in judgment correspond to the subject-predicate linguistic structure, that one has assessed the 'profundity' of the British and their language separately, that Shawnee conceptual categories correspond to Shawnee grammatical categories? Listeners are notoriously bad at keeping the ideas expressed in a linguistic message separate from superficial features of the message. Thus the same message, expressed in identical words by speakers with different dialects, is often less favorably evaluated when spoken in a socially less prestigious dialect, e.g., Quebec French. This is not an example of Whorfian linguistic relativity (the words and the grammar are the same), merely a demonstration that it is no trivial matter to assess such things as Jenisch's 'moral essence' and language separately.
2. Experimental Tests of the Whorfian Hypothesis

It is unfortunate that the largest research effort related to the Whorfian hypothesis has involved rote learning of simple colored stimuli. The idea seems appealing: choose a dimension for which we can be sure the sensory information is processed similarly the world over, but where different languages code this sensory information in reliably different ways. However, color
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is too tightly related to the physics and physiology of vision, and rote learning is too modest an exemplar of what could be regarded as thought for significant interactions between language and thought to be apparent. Initial investigations, however, were promising. A study by Brown and Lenneberg (1954) assessed the linguistic 'codability' of colors and showed this was related to the colors' discriminability and memorability. Codability was assessed by a number of measures of length and speed of response and intersubject and intrasubject consistency: a color which was given a short response (e.g., red), and which subjects produced rapidly and consistently on repeated presentations of the color was regarded as highly codable; a color that might be described reddish purple, which was produced more hesitantly and with less consistency would be regarded as less codable. Examples of these colors were briefly presented to American college students (first language English) and after delays ranging from seven seconds to three minutes they were required to point to them on a large chart of possible colors. There were positive correlations between codability and memory performance, and these correlations were larger the greater the delay. A study of Zuni Indians, using similar materials, showed that there was not a complete correspondence between the codability of colors for English speakers and Zuni speakers. In particular, the Zuni do not have a label to distinguish between orange and yellow, and this was related to the Zuni speakers' memory performance, where they frequently confused orange and yellow stimuli. The notion of codability, which proves to be a useful concept, shall be returned to, but first it must be pointed out that crosslinguistic studies with color have proved to be more difficult to interpret than was first thought. Rosch's work was prominent in the 1970s. Rosen's starting point was the work of Berlin and Kay in 1969, who had established that color terminology was not arbitrary across languages and, despite disagreements between speakers about where the boundaries between various color terms should be placed, there was good agreement, even across languages, about the identities of certain basic color terms, which Berlin and Kay termed 'focal' colors. Rosch studied the Dani, an agricultural people of West Irian, who have only two color terms. For them, focal colors were not more codable than other colors, but they were more memorable (tested by recognition after 30 seconds) and they were more learnable (tested by pairing colors and arbitrary names and testing learning over several days). This suggests that an important influence on performance on these tasks is the precise location of the color in a psychological representation, which is determined by innate and universal properties of the color-vision system, not by language-specific labels.

Thought and Language Welsh and English by Ellis and Hennelley in 1980, and confirmed in a study of English, Spanish, Hebrew, and Arabic by Naveh-Benjamin and Ayres (1986). The results are quite substantial, with English speakers (mean number of syllables per digit 1.0, the digit 7 being excluded from the Naveh-Benjamin and Ayres study) having a mean span of 7.21 digits, and Arabic speakers (mean number of syllables per digit 2.25) having a mean span of 5.77. Whether this early bottleneck in processing has any implications for more complex thought processes is not clear: there are no reports of speakers of a particular language being particularly disadvantaged in calculation, and it would be fanciful to suppose that the Arabs developed algebra because 3. Codability they were having such difficulties with arithmetic. PerCodability is a concept that has appealed to many experimental psychologists working on short-term haps the effects of the bottleneck exist, but are too memory: the quantity of material individuals are cap- subtle to have been recognized so far. The value of labeling in some problem-solving tasks able of retaining accurately in short-term memory is limited, and different encodings of the same infor- has been demonstrated. Rommetweit (in Campbell mation can differ in how readily they can be 'squeezed and Smith 1978) asked 8-year old Norwegian children in.' An early demonstration of this was by S. Smith to solve a number of problems appearing in one of (cited in Miller 1956), who trained subjects to recede two linguistic forms: either they had to select an object a list of binary digits (Os and Is) into octal (the digits with respect to two adjectival properties (e.g., in an 0 to 7), so 000 is receded as 0, 001 as 1, 010 as 2, etc. array of circles of different colors and sizes, they were Subjects so trained were able to recall accurately much asked to select the second largest white circle), or one longer sequences of binary digits than subjects who of the adjectives was combined with the noun into a single label (the phrase white circle was replaced by had not received this training. snowball}. The children performed better on the Such a result points to one important general function of language in thought: recoding material in a second version of the task. Examples of language as a coding device are not compact form enables us to retain more of it in shortterm memory, and any thought processes that depend restricted to material that is already in a verbal form. on manipulation of such material should benefit. The Labeling of nonverbal material (e.g., pictures) is a details of this idea have been worked out more fully useful mnemonic strategy, particularly because words recently: 'working memory' is the preferred term for are more easily rehearsed than visual images—use of manipulations of material on a short-term basis, and this strategy does not appear in children until they are it has been established that immediate recall of verbal of school age. But labels simplify or even distort the material is heavily dependent on the operations of information they are summarizing. A study by Caran 'articulatory loop' in working memory, whose michael, et al. (1932) presented subjects with ambigucapacity is limited by how much the subject can say ous figures (e.g., a crescent shape) for which different in 1.5-2 seconds. If the material takes longer than 2 subjects were given different labels (crescent moon or seconds to say (because it contains many syllables or Letter C). In reproducing these figures later, subjects because the subject is not an agile articulator) then it made systematic distortions of the original figure in will not always be accurately recalled (for a good the direction of the label they had heard (the crescent was more moon-like or more C-like). review, see Baddeley 1986). A further example of the way language can distort This property of the human memory system has nonverbal memory is provided in a study by Loftus curious implications for crosscultural intelligence testand Palmer (1974). They showed subjects a ing. Many tests of intelligence include as a component car crash and afterwards asked them how fastfilm of a the cars a test of 'digit span' or some similar measure of were traveling when the collision occurred. If the word immediate recall of unrelated words. Digit span (how smashed was used in the question, estimates for speed many digits one can reliably recall immediately after were higher than if the more neutral word hit was one has heard them) depends on how fast they can be used. Moreover, when questioned later, subjects who said. Compared with a monosyllabic digit speaker, had previously received the smashed question were subjects who speak languages with polysyllabic digits more likely to report (erroneously) the presence of will be able to say fewer digits in two seconds and thus broken glass. remember fewer of them. If this is not taken into account in comparing raw intelligence test scores 4. Presuppositions and Prejudice across languages, the polysyllabic speaker will seem The examples in Sect. 3 are small-scale and shortless intelligent. This effect was first demonstrated for term: labeling may effect memory for isolated patterns
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Further work, however, has suggested that the effects of the innate differential discriminability of colors can be partialed out in appropriately designed experiments. A measure of 'communication accuracy' (how well a speaker can describe a color to enable it to be identified by a listener) then proves an effective predictor of memory performance. So effects of language on memory for colors are demonstrable, but they are effects of some subtlety, and are not the most direct examples of language influencing thought. A succinct review of this work is provided by D'Andrade (1989).

Language and Mind for a few minutes, but are there more long-term influ- marked adjectives have greater general frequency of ences of language on significant areas of our cog- usage in the language than unmarked adjectives; nitions? One fruitful source of evidence is in the nonetheless Clark's results show that problem solvers presuppositions people bring to the interpretation of prefer to create representations based on one set of utterances. If this author talks of a surgeon many linguistic labels rather than another. A further example of the influence of labels on listeners in his culture will assume he is referring to a man, even though this is not explicitly stated, nor is it thought is the phenomenon of 'functional fixedness.' necessarily true. If he says Jeff is a worse player than Subjects generally find it difficult to solve problems George he is suggesting that both Jeff and George are requiring them to use objects in novel ways, such as bad players, otherwise he would have used the more using a spanner to complete an electrical circuit: the neutral George is a better player than Jeff. Dis- normal function of the object appears 'fixed.' This entangling the distinctive contribution of language is phenomenon is enhanced if the experimenter uses the tricky: in the author's culture most surgeons are male, label spanner in presenting the problem: the label and this is a fact about the culture, not about appears to encourage subjects to create an inaplanguage, so it is not easy to tell whether language is propriate representation for the problem. The most contentious area concerned with the relevant here. One approach is to use problems which are neutral effects of labeling on thought is that of prejudice. with respect to culture. Noordman (1978) gave Dutch There is a choice of labels to refer to an individual queer/ students problems such as A is the father ofB, A is the (nigger/negro/colored/black/Afro-Caribbean; chick/crumpet/date/escort/girlgrandfather ofC, B is not the father ofC, What relation poof/gay/homosexual; could B be to C? The students gave predominantly friend). The label chosen undoubtedly reflects some male answers, and in particular they more often chose of the attitudes of the speaker, but one can also ask the correct answer uncle (50 percent of choices) than whether use of a label can shape attitudes—does the correct answer mother (20 percent of choices). referring to a person who presides over a committee The pattern changed when mother and grandmother as a chairman lead one to expect that this person replaced father and grandfather in the problem: here should be a man? In this author's culture, a 25-year there was a bias to give female answers, though it was old woman is often referred to as a girl, whereas the not so strong as the male bias in the male version of corresponding term boy is much less frequently used the problem, and in particular the correct answer of a 25-year old man—idoes this influence attitudes to father (38 percent) was chosen more often than the people referred to in this way? The evidence suggests correct answer aunt (30 percent). These results show that such influences exist. For example, subjects who that problem solvers use the language of the problem were asked to describe the images suggested by chapto create a representation which may be incomplete: ter headings in a sociological text were more likely to a problem in which only one gender is referred to report images containing only males when headings may lead to a representation in which all the possible used generic man (Industrial Man) than when gender solutions may have the same gender. However, the was not mentioned (Industrial Society). Kitto (1989) greater bias exhibited when all the terms are male composed short references for hypothetical applicants than when they are all female may have cultural, not for jobs. All the applicants were females aged 25. linguistic, roots (one is more used to reading exam- Subjects (mainly university students) preferred applicants whose reference referred to them as girl for the ination problems which refer to he than she). Gender biases could be viewed as an example of low-status job of waitress, but they preferred applithe more general phenomenon of 'markedness.' Here cants referred to as woman for the higher-status job bipolar adjectival pairs such as good/bad, tall/short, of personal assistant. Subjects commented that the fast/slow are not considered to be symmetrical, but persons described in the girl references were livelier the preferred 'unmarked' member of the pair does but less reliable or competent than the persons double duty, both indicating a particular pole and referred to in the woman references: this was true even naming the entire dimension (this 'neutral' aspect of for subjects who appeared unaware that their attitudes the unmarked adjective can be seen in such phrases as were being manipulated by the presence of girl or six feet tall and How fast is your typing?). Clark (1969) woman. One way of looking at these results is that girl showed that problems involving unmarked adjectives elicits many presuppositions including those associare easier than their marked-adjective counter parts ated with the 'proper' use of the term to refer to a (If John is better than Pete, and Pete is better than female of school age—such females are typically liveDick, then who is best? is solved faster than If John is lier but less competent than their adult counterparts. worse than Pete, and Pete is worse than Dick, then Society will not change overnight by banning the use who is worst?). A full interpretation of this result is of words like girl (when applied to an adult) and controversial, since it is not known whether it derives chairman, but it is important to realize how these from some fundamental property of linguistic struc- terms may provoke prejudices which are all the more ture or from the more mundane observation that insidious for our not always being aware of them.

Thought and Language
5. Representations

The term 'representation' has been used throughout this article without giving a precise account of what a representation is. Behaviorist psychologists have often criticized cognitive psychologists for using such hypothetical constructs without precision, and hence without explanatory power. The problem is not easy, and it is not made any easier by the need to consider how much of a subject's performance is to be ascribed to mental representations per se, and how much can be accounted for by the mental processes used to access these representations. Occasionally psychologists have produced theories where the representations have been specified very precisely. For example, Johnson-Laird's theory of syllogistic reasoning proposes that propositions such as All A are B or Some B are not C are encoded by subjects into a 'mental model,' and the form of encoding for each proposition, and how the subject combines propositions, are fully specified. The theory is very successful at predicting the relative difficulty of different syllogisms. A rather different approach to representations is to ask subjects to make judgments about some domain (perceptual, such as the similarity of rectangles of different heights and widths; or conceptual, like the similarity of various animals) and then use mathematical and statistical techniques to infer the structure of the subjects' underlying representations (for an authoritative but difficult review, see Suppes, et al. 1989: ch. 14). A general summary of this work is that perceptual judgments can often be successfully characterized by representations with spatial properties (with percepts corresponding to points in a space, and the dissimilarity of two percepts corresponding to distance apart of the corresponding points in the space). However, categories with verbal labels, such as animals or countries, are often better described by tree structures or (equivalently) by collections of features. Here, dissimilarity can be characterized by distance apart in a tree, where each concept corresponds to a terminal node of the tree (end of a branch) and distance is measured by distance between the branches. Features have the advantage of providing a richer description of the relation between two concepts: in particular, the features can be parceled into three sets (what features concept A has that concept B does not, what features concept B has that concept A does not, and what features they have in common). With such a characterization, judgmental asymmetries and the effects of context can be neatly handled. For example, it has been shown that subjects' judgments of the similarity of North Korea to China (concentrating on features that North Korea has but China does not) exceeded their judgments of the similarity of China to North Korea (concentrating on features that China has but North Korea does not). Also, when asked to

make judgments about similarity, subjects put greater emphasis on common features than when asked to make judgments of dissimilarity: this explains why one group of subjects rated the former West and East Germany as more similar than Sri Lanka and Nepal, but a different group of subjects also rated the former West and East Germany as more dissimilar than Sri Lanka and Nepal. The implication of this work for the relation between language and thought is that concepts, at least those that can be readily labeled, seem to be characterized largely with features, and features also play an important role in linguists' characterization of language. Thus, one important common ground between thought representations and linguistic descriptions is at the feature level. Note, however, that such a statement stops well short of Whorf's claim that linguistic features determine conceptual features.
6. Inner Speech

The final area of interaction to be considered in this survey concerns the supervisory role of language in monitoring complex tasks. Vygotsky is prominent among psychologists who have suggested that talking to ourselves is an important aspect of problem solving. In the course of cognitive development overt use of speech when thinking gives way to what Vygotsky called 'inner speech,' but such activity retains all the grammatical and semantic properties of overt speech. By talking to ourselves we can bring together in working memory strands of ideas which might otherwise be kept separate in different modules of our cognitive system. This is much the same function as has been suggested for consciousness itself (see Oatley 1988 for a discussion of 'Vygotskyan consciousness') though consciousness would embrace more than inner speech. Linking speech with consciousness should suggest that speech is not always advantageous for efficient cognitive functioning. It can readily be shown that on occasion conscious processes interfere with an activity: describing what we are doing while we are tying a shoelace or riding a bicycle disrupts performance. Formal demonstration of this point is provided, for example, by Hayes and Broadbent (1988). They asked subjects to interact with a computer so as to control the computer output. The output was determined by one of two equations linking the subject's input and the computer's present or previous output. Hayes and Broadbent discriminated two forms of learning: S-mode (selective) learning, which is explicit and reportable; and U-mode (unselective) learning, which is implicit and not readily reportable. They were able to show that one of the equations in the computer-control task led to most subjects using Smode learning, while the other led to U-mode learning. (This is based on the amount of material that needs to be held in working memory: if the capacity of working memory is exceeded, only implicit U-mode
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Language and Mind learning is possible.) Hayes and Broadbent (1988) trained subjects on these tasks and then unexpectedly changed the equations determining the computer's output. Subjects who had learnt in S-mode coped with the transfer better than subjects who had learnt in Umode. The experiment was repeated with different subjects who in addition were required to generate a 'random' sequence of digits while carrying out the interaction with the computer. In this experiment Umode subjects adjusted better to the unexpected change in the equation than did S-mode subjects. The relevance for the present discussion is as follows. S-mode learning involves the use of 'inner speech' in working memory; disrupt the speech by a task involving a verbal component, such as random digit generation, and the learning is disrupted. Umode learning does not rely on inner speech, and indeed when an unexpected problem is met, such as the change in equation in the computer task, attempts to use inner speech interfere with efficient performance; irrelevant concurrent verbal activity actually helps, because this stops interference from inner speech. Extending the idea of inner speech to nonhumans has obvious risks, but the success of training apes to use language-like symbol systems (sign language, manipulation of plastic tokens) suggests looking at the cognitive benefits such animals derive from language training. On the whole, evidence for language training benefiting ape cognition is slight. In particular, it is difficult to demonstrate differences in cognitive abilities before and after training. However, one clear example does exist: Premack (1988) reports an experiment in which chimpanzees derived significant benefit from language training when they attempted an analogy task. The key element of the language training was the acquisition of the plastic symbols for 'same' and 'different.' It is tempting to see these same/ different elements as forming a crucial part of ape inner speech which is used to operate on the analogy problem.
7. Conclusion

may help: rather than say The area of a square is equal to the length of one of its sides multiplied by itselfy significant compression can be achieved by using the algebraic expression A=s2. If this was all that could be achieved with algebraic notation, a modest quantitative improvement in notation would have been made. But mathematicians have used this notation to extend knowledge, for example, in expressions for the volume of a cube (V=s3), and even for the volume of an unvisualizable n-dimensional hypercube (V=sn). The notation can also be used to manipulate existing knowledge, for example to derive the length of side of a square of known area (s = Al/2). So the important property of this algebraic notation is not simply that it compresses the represented information, but that it offers ways to operate on and extend this information. The same is undoubtedly true for the relation between language and thought. However, current work has stopped largely at the level of language as a compressing device, and understanding of the richness of language as a representational medium for thought (alluded to by Whorf, but certainly not established by him) remains as yet beyond our grasp. See also: Concepts; Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.
Bibliography Baddeley A D 1986 Working Memory. Clarendon Press, Oxford Brown R W, Lenneberg E H 1954 A study in language and cognition. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 49: 454-62 Campbell R N, Smith P T (eds.) 1978 Recent Advances in the Psychology of Language, 2 vols. Plenum Press, New York Carmichael L, Hogan H P, Walter A A 1932 An experimental study of the effect of language on the reproduction of visually perceived form. Journal of Experimental Psychology 15: 73-86 Chomsky N 1966 Cartesian Linguistics. Harper and Row, New York Clark H H 1969 Linguistic processes in deductive reasoning. Psychological Review 76: 387-404 D'Andrade R G 1989 Cultural cognition. In: Posner M I (ed.) Foundations of Cognitive Science. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Hayes N A, Broadbent D E 1988 Two modes of learning for interactive tasks. Cognition 28: 249-76 Humboldt W von 1971 Linguistic Variability and Intellectual Development. University of Miami Press, Coral Gables, FL Jespersen O 1922 Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin. George Allen and Unwin, London Johnson-Laird P N 1983 Mental Models. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Kitto J 1989 Gender reference terms: separating the women from girls. British Journal of Social Psychology 28: 18587 Loftus E F, Palmer J P 1974 Reconstruction of automobile destruction: An example of the interaction between language and memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 13: 585-89 Miller G A 1956 The magical number seven, plus or minus

Successful demonstrations of the influence of language on thought have been confined largely to the lexicon: information is more successfully retained and manipulated in working memory if it is in an articulatorily compact, and linguistically unmarked, lexical form, and particular lexical items can influence our memories and lead us to make possibly erroneous presuppositions in problem solving and in making judgments. Several of these demonstrations are purely quantitative, for example, the limited capacity of the articulatory loop, and whether the subject is articulating or not when attempting a problem. Qualitative aspects beyond the lexicon, in particular whether grammar influences thought, have not been addressed. An analogy with mathematical thinking
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On what may be called the traditional view, a statement is analytic if it is true solely in virtue of the meanings of the expressions it contains. For example, A triangle is a three-sided figure is analytic because true in virtue of the meanings of the expressions triangle and three-sided figure. Much controversy, however, surrounds the concept of analyticity, which has had a prominent role in philosophy since the time of Kant, particularly in connection with topics in the theory of knowledge and the theory of meaning. This article deals first with the traditional view and its ramifications and then considers criticisms of the notion of analyticity deriving from the work of W. V. O. Quine.
1. The Traditional View

The familiar way of defining analyticity given above raises a question about the bearers of truth-values. In the sense intended here statements are declarative sentences in a particular language. It may be wondered whether statements as opposed to what they express are properly regarded as being either true or false. Even so, it is clear that statements may express truths. The statement A triangle is a three-sided figure may count as analytic insofar as the meanings of its constituent expressions guarantee that it expresses a truth. By contrast, Tom drew a triangle on a sheet of paper is not analytic (following Kantian terminology it would be called a synthetic statement) because the meanings of its constituent expressions do not guarantee that it expresses a truth. Whether the statement is true or not depends upon what Tom did and not just on the meanings of the relevant expressions. Thus far analyticity has been taken to apply to statements conceived as a kind of sentence. Yet the term may also be used of what statements express. The analytic statement A garage is a place for storing or repairing motor vehicles is a sentence of the English language expressing the proposition that a garage is a place for storing or repairing motor vehicles. This same proposition may be expressed in languages other than English provided they have expressions which express the

same concepts and thus have the same meanings as the expressions of which the English sentence is composed. Moreover, the proposition in question may be said to be analytic in that it is true in virtue of its constituent concepts, these being the concepts expressed by the English expressions garage and place for storing or repairing motor vehicles. In the light of the preceeding account it comes as no surprise that analyticity, conceived as truth in virtue of meanings, should be thought to explicate the concept of necessity, conceived as truth in all possible worlds. Suppose that the statement A triangle is a three-sided figure expresses a truth (a true proposition) in virtue of the meanings of the relevant constituent expressions. Then the truth of the proposition expressed is in no way dependent on facts about the actual world. No matter what the world is or might have been the proposition in question would remain true and that is what is captured by the claim that it is true in all possible worlds.
2. The Philosophical Significance of the Traditional View

The concept of analyticity offers a solution to a difficulty in empiricist theory of knowledge. In its classical version empiricism holds that all knowledge in some sense derives from experience. However, it is plausible to suppose that we know some things a priori, that is to say, independently of experience. At any rate it seems that we can know that a triangle is a three-sided figure or even that the angles of a triangle add up to 180° without having empirical grounds for accepting these propositions. In the first of these cases it is tempting to regard the proposition in question as self-evident—we just see that it is true. In the second case it seems that we can prove that the proposition is true from propositions which are self-evident. The traditional view yields an account of how we can have a priori knowledge. The propositions which we can know a priori are analytic. If a proposition is self-evident the knowledge that it is true is guaranteed by a grasp of its constituent concepts. If we fail to see
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Truth and Meaning that a bachelor is an unmarried man then we lack a grasp of the concept of a bachelor. There are other analytic propositions which, though not self-evident, we know a priori because there is proof of them from self-evident premises which we know a priori. The ability to appreciate the validity of such proofs is to be explained in terms of abilities which constitute a grasp of the relevant concepts. Having these conceptual abilities will not guarantee that we can produce proofs on demand. But the account has it that recognition that a proof is valid is explained by the interlocking exercise of conceptual abilities. This application of the traditional view has the virtue of making a priori knowledge seem unmysterious. If it is along the right lines then it can be explained how we know some things to be true independently of experience, that is, in the absence of empirical grounds for believing that they are true. However, the account has to be supplemented if it is to show how a priori knowledge can be squared with classical empiricism. What is missing is an explanation of how it can be that we have a priori knowledge if all knowledge is in some sense derived from experience. In classical empiricism the required supplement is provided by a theory of concepts. The theory has it that no concept is innate and that all concepts are acquired via the impact of experience. So, for example, we would acquire the concept of redness by a process of abstraction from properties of the visual experiences we have as we look at red things. Thus even a priori knowledge would be derived from experience insofar as concepts are derived from experience.
3. Analyticity and Semantics

involved, would be committed to taking the statement to express a truth.
4. The Attack on Analyticity

In a classic article entitled 'Two dogmas of empiricism' (in Quine 1961) W. V. O. Quine argues that the concept of analyticity is irredeemably obscure. The discussion assumes a distinction between analytic statements which are logical truths like
No unmarried man is married
(1)

and analytic statements which are not logical truths like
No bachelor is married

(2)

The concept of analyticity is of interest aside from its links with the empiricist doctrines outlined above for it has a place within a broad conception of what is involved in understanding the meanings of expressions in natural languages. There is some plausibility in the idea that if one understands the English term garage then one has a mastery of certain rules or conventions governing the use of the term. For example, there might be rules which require that if garage applies to something then place for storing or repairing motor vehicles also applies to it, and vice versa. The totality of rules governing a given term would determine its meaning and thus what concept it expresses. This conception can be extended to cover logical expressions like and, either... or... , and the logical concepts linked with these expressions. In the case of and there might be a rule which requires that if you take a conjunction of the form P and Q to express a truth then you must take P to express a truth and Q to express a truth. An analytic statement would be a statement the rules for whose constituent expressions are such that anyone who has a mastery of these rules, and thus understands the expressions
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Logical truths are statements which are true and remain true under all interpretations of their nonlogical vocabulary. Nonlogical analytic statements can be turned into logical truths by substituting synonyms for synonyms. So (2) can be turned into (1) by substituting unmarried man for bachelor. Much of the discussion of Two dogmas' focuses on the idea of nonlogical analyticity. A major theme is that concepts commonly used to explain this notion are no clearer than what they are meant to explain, and further, that when one tries to elucidate them one finds oneself in turn falling back on the notion of analyticity. For example, the notion of synonymy just used to account for the analyticity of (2) is, according to Quine, obscure and its obscurity is not removed by accounting for the synonymy of bachelor and unmarried man in terms of the analyticity of All and only bachelors are unmarried men. (This line of thought is submitted to close scrutiny in Grice and Strawson 1956.) Quine is equally pessimistic about the idea of deploying the concept of a semantic rule to account for analyticity. Here the main target is work of Carnap on artificial languages (Carnap 1956). Carnap devised for artificial languages of a certain type a system of semantic rules which, roughly speaking, combine to fix the truth conditions for the sentences of these languages. It turns out that there are certain sentences whose truth is guaranteed by the relevant semantic rules. These are the 'L-true sentences.' Quine argues that L-truth fails to provide the required elucidation for analyticity since, among other things, a satisfying theory of semantic rules is not available. J. J. Katz has developed an account of analyticity within the context of a general semantic theory which represents the meanings of lexical items in terms of semantic markers denoting conceptual constituents of meanings (see Katz 1972 for discussion and further references). From Quine's standpoint, however, an account is still needed of what determines which conceptual constituents should be assigned to a given lexical item. In writings subsequent to 'Two dogmas' Quine attempts to make sense of analyticity in behavioral

Communication
terms. A sentence is said to be stimulus analytic if it commands assent no matter what sensory stimulations the subject is undergoing. As Quine recognizes, this only roughly approximates to the traditional notion since it fails to discriminate between sentences of the kind No bachelor is married and cases like There have been black dogs. In Two dogmas' Quine takes the concept of logical truth to be relatively unproblematic, though he implies that nothing is gained by regarding logical truths as analytic. He assumes that the explication of logical truth does not require the notion of analyticity or any of the other problematic notions with which it is linked. P. F. Strawson has argued that this assumption is false (Strawson 1957). The statement No unilluminated book is illuminated is true, and indeed logically true, on readings which take the two occurrences of illuminated to have the same meaning. But it does not remain true on a reading which gives the first occurrence the sense of /// and the second the sense of decorated. So it does not remain true under all interpretations of its nonlogical vocabulary, but only on those interpretations which give the same meaning to all occurrences of its nonlogical vocabulary. Strawson's point is that Quine cannot after all dispense with the notion of sameness of meaning even at the level of logical truths. Work by Hilary Putnam and Saul Kripke on theoretical terms in science and on natural-kind terms casts doubt on the idea that the meanings of such terms are captured by analytic statements. Their discussions point to the deeper issue of whether the use of terms like these is governed by the sort of rules which would generate analytic truths. Among other important issues also discussed by Putnam and Kripke is whether all necessary truths are analytic truths and whether only analytic truths can be known a priori. Scepticism about analyticity is widespread, but for a more optimistic review of the issues, see Boghossian 1997. See also: A Priori; Concepts; Meaning: Philosophical Theories; Natural Kinds; Necessity.
Bibliography Ayer A J 1946 Language, Truth and Logic, 2nd edn. Gollancz, London Boghossian P A 1997 Analyticity. In: Hale B, Wright C (eds) A Companion to the Philosophy of Language. Blackwell, Oxford Carnap R 1956 Meaning and Necessity, 2nd edn. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL Grice H P, Strawson P F 1956 In defense of a dogma. The Philosophical Review 65:141-58 Katz J J 1972 Semantic Theory. Harper and Row, New York Kitcher P 1984 The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge. Oxford University Press, New York Kripke S A 1980 Naming and Necessity. Blackwell, Oxford Putnam H 1975 Mind, Language and Reality Philosophical Papers, vol. 2. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Quine W V O 1960 Word and Object. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Quine W V O 1961 From a Logical Point of View, 2nd edn. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Strawson P F 1957 Propositions, concepts and logical truths. The Philosophical Quarterly 7:15-25; repr. in Strawson (1971) Strawson P F 1971 Logico-Linguistic Papers. Methuen, London

Communication
K. L. Berge

The content and use of the term 'communication' is even by humanistic standards extremely ambiguous, and it has therefore often been difficult to use in practical, empirical work. The most exact use of the term has been standardized in Shannon and Weaver's information theory. Within the tradition of semiotics, the value of communication as a term has been questioned, and in linguistics the term has sometimes been used as a synonym or part-synonym with more exactly defined terms such as use, parole, text, behavior, and performance. In spite of this, certain theorists—often those with a background in cybernetics—have used 'communication' as a generic term for all theories about man, in the same way as semioticians have defined the domain of semiotics.

A very simple and general, but neither unproblematic nor uncontroversial, way of defining communication is to view it as an information process going on between at least two human communicators (not necessarily two persons as long as one can communicate with oneself) embedded in a context, and a situation. More specifically, communication can be defined as a generic term covering all messages uttered in different contexts and situations. A message can be divided into sign-vehicle and meaning. The sign-vehicle then covers all possible variants on the expression plane of linguistic utterances, and meaning covers all possible variants on what is called, in the glossematic school, the content plane. In this way, communication is used as a socio-

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Truth and Meaning logical term, and language is viewed as a primarily social fact. Furthermore, communication can also be conceived of as inherent in the linguistic message. The situation, the context, and the communicators involved in communication make their mark on the content and expression planes of the message. This definition is neutral with regard to the different traditions in linguistics which divide language for instance into 'langue' or 'system' on the one hand, and 'parole' or 'behavior' on the other. ously challenged in the three following communication models.

1.2 The Circular, Dialogic Model The basic idea in what is here called the circular or dialogic model, is that for communication to take place, it is not sufficient that an addresser manifests his intention in a message which results in an effect in the addressee. It is also necessary to give the addressee a more active role in communication. First, this active part is the more or less conscious interpretation process that the addressee must be 1. 'Communication': Different Models and Metaphors involved in for the intended message to get through. Second, a more or less expressed manifestation of One possible way of bringing order into the rather chaotic world of the different approaches to the study the intended effect in the form of a response, answer, of communication in linguistics, is to differentiate action, etc. from the addressee is necessary for the between the various trends in communication-relevant addresser to understand that his message has been research. These trends can be classified according to received—in fact, is a message. Without a response of the basic models of communication they have some sort, the addresser would be left in a situation adopted. Or rather, according to the different meta- where he is at best talking to himself, at worst is phors that linguists use in order to try to illustrate or indulging in a monologue more typical of madness. Thus, the interpretation requirement is not restricted make explicit the phenomenon of communication. to the addressee alone. The addresser, too, has to 1.1 The Linear, Conduit Model identify some sort of signal in the addressee's message The simplest model of communication has been called which can be interpreted as a response or reaction to the conduit model (Reddy 1979) because of its under- the intended message. In this way, communication can be seen as a system lying assumption that language functions as a sort of channel, or tool for transferring a linguistic message of questions and answers, or as a sort of cooperation from a source (or sender) to a destination (or hearer). where the communicators are actively organized in This idea of communication has some of its roots in the construction of the message. It is not necessary information theory. To separate what they call infor- that the addresser's intended meaning is identically mation from communication, certain philosophers of reproduced by the addressee. If such an interpretation language (e.g., Grice) have advocated the idea that is at all possible, it is certainly limited to extremely communication proper is characterized by intentional restricted contexts, e.g., when certain logicians comcommunication, or what Grice calls 'non-natural municate solely with the help of logical formulas. The meaning.' The idea is that the addresser ('sender') prototypical communication between humans is in intends that the message (or utterance) will cause what fact characterized by the opposite: a partial, or limited is called an effect in the addressee ('receiver'). The only understanding, or even misunderstanding, on the part necessary condition is that the addressee recognize this of the addressee, which has to be clarified by further intention. In spite of the differences between these messages. Communication is not only the transfer of approaches, they are basically ideological models of intentions with language as its tool. It is a constructive communication, and this makes them closely related process going on in time. The message is constructed to perhaps the oldest theory of communication, through the mutual activity of the actors. In this way, namely that of classical rhetoric. Rhetoric can be communication is a creative dynamic process. In fact, defined as a theory of communication that seeks to if communication did not have these qualities, a great find the quality which makes it possible for an deal of quite normal linguistic activity, like small talk addresser to persuade or convince his addressee about during a lunch break, would be meaningless. What is retained in this model from the conduit something. The most problematic aspects in these models are communication model, is the notion of intention. For the notion of effect, or perlocution on the addressee's dialogue to take place, it is necessary that the comside, and the notion of intention on the addresser's municators intend to take part in the conversation, side. How are we to build a theory of communication that they accept some sort of honesty principle, etc. on such vague terms, and how are we to find out what Such principles are described in theories of conis/was the intention in a message and how are we to versational implicatures or of pragmatic universals. distinguish between the different effects? Other problematic aspects are the basically individualistic and 1.3 The Feedback, Interaction Model monological views of communication that advocates The third model of communication distinguishes itself of such models implicitly accept. Such views are seri- from the dialogical model by doing away with the
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Communication notion of intention altogether. In this model, communication is viewed in a much more general way than in the two previous ones. Communication would include all those processes by which human beings influence one another. In its most extreme form, this model entails that all behavior can be said to be communicative. The interaction of human beings is characterized by the necessity to communicate; this necessity is superior to the notion of intention, which is based not only on the will to communicate, but also the will to interpret. Communication is thus part of perception; attention to and interpretation of communication are part of the process of perceiving. What remains in this model are the principles of mutuality and reciprocity as basic requirements for communication to take place. However, those principles are not governed by normatively colored principles, such as Grice's conversational implicatures and Habermas's universal pragmatic consensus principles. In those frameworks, communication is a certain mutual tuning which necessarily must involve a certain moral commitment, that one believes what one says to be true, that one intends that which one says, and that the addressee necessarily takes for granted that the addresser follows these and similar principles. Communication, in the feedback model, is not characterized by a search for what could be called mutual knowledge, consensus, or intersubjective understanding. Rather, the opposite is the case, namely that to communicate is to experience such principles as ideal goals: one cannot share other people's experiences or mental worlds, or truly understand the intentions of other communicators. The reason is that these principles of general reciprocity and mutuality are subject to societal power relations. Such relations are neither intended to be recognized in the message, nor perhaps even intended to be a part of the meaning of the message at all. But as sociologists insist on telling the naive linguist, power relations are inherent in every communicated message. There is no society in existence without social hierarchies of some sort; a powerless Utopia is at best a pastoral idyll, at worst a totalitarian goal. The basic problem in the feedback model is how to distinguish communication from information. As long as neither the addresser's nor the addressee's intentions are preconditions to communication, how are we to discriminate between all the incoming information, both on the content and expression planes of a message—an amount of information which, according to certain theorists, is infinite? It seems that this problem can be solved only by defining communication as involving both information (in the sense of information theory), the conveyed message, and the understanding of the message. Advocates of this model focus on the temporal nature of communication; communication is viewed as an enduring process which imposes meaning upon disturbances and noise, through the selective processes of information, message conveyance and understanding. Such a selection process is, of course, determined by the internalized language of the communicators, and is governed by other semiotic systems as well. 1.4 The Self-regulatory (Autopoesis) Model The autopoesis model appears to be a radicalized version of the feedback model, in the sense that the model seems to have done away with what have been called the principles of reciprocity and mutuality. The autopoesis model is therefore something as seemingly paradoxical as a solipsistic model of communication. In this model, the communicators (or as they are called, the 'emitters' and 'receivers') do not communicate in order to transfer and create a message (as in the conduit and dialogue models), or even to create some information, a conveyed message, and an understanding, but simply to integrate elements from the communicative situation (the environment) which can contribute to the communicators' so-called selfregulation and self-creation (hence the term 'autopoetic'). This self-regulation and self-creation is an individual, idiosyncratic version of an interaction input. A basic goal of this self-regulation or autopoesis is to create a difference with respect to all other (real or potential) communicators. In this sense, communication is necessary for the individual in order to be constituted as an individual. The communicators are seen as closed systems, insofar as nothing can be integrated which is not specified in the system's own structure. It is important to note that the system is not a static structure, but rather a process. Communication is self-reflection, characterized as an unceasing search for functional substitutes. Interestingly enough, this model allows for another, more advanced view of linguistic messages, such as written texts, than is normal in the linguistic tradition. Instead of being viewed as inferior reproductions of the prototypical or even 'natural' linguistic communication, namely verbal conversation, written messages are viewed as more communicative and creative, in that they not only allow for a finer distinction between the individual communicator and his communicative environment, but also for more permanent self-referential and autopoetic activity on the part of the individual communicator. Oral dialogue is thus reduced to one type of communication among others.
2. The Relation Between Communication and 'Language'

So far, the fundamental problem of the relation between communication and language has not even been superficially touched upon. Language is what most linguists recognize as the one and only object of linguistics; however, its relation to communication is a matter of continuous controversy: in fact, it is not even clear that the phenomenon of communication is
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Truth and Meaning at all relevant for the study of languages, and of language as such (see Sect. 3, below). Still, most linguists are willing to accept a division of the phenomenon of language. On the one hand, it is seen as a kind of stable, over-individual structure, or type-schema, which for the sake of simplicity may be called a 'signification system/ On the other hand, it can be viewed as a set of tokens somehow belonging to such a schema, these may be called 'utterances.' This opposition between a system of signification and its associated utterances has many names, e.g., langue-parole (Saussure), schema-usage (Hjelmslev), code-behavior (Halliday), competence-performance (Chomsky), to name just a few of the most influential. The status of communication varies depending on, first, which opposition one considers most relevant, and second, which element in the opposition one chooses as most fundamental for the study of language. The latter alternative allows us to distinguish between what the Soviet philosopher of language V. N. Voloshinov called 'abstract objectivists' on the one hand, and on the other, a heterogeneous group (consisting of behaviorists, empiricists, nominalists, 'socio'-linguists, processualists, etc.) called 'skepticists.' These groups will be dealt with in the following. 2.1 The Abstract Objectivist View The abstract objectivist view can, in the light of the history of modern linguistics, be considered the traditional way of seeing things. The prototypical abstract objectivist sees language as a relatively stable, finite, and invariant system of signification, that is either as a unifunctional, adult-type system which is the goal of socialization, or as a social institution (Saussure's 'langue'), or as a universal innate mental grammar (Chomsky's 'competence'), or even as a pure form (Hjelmslev's 'schema'). The relation between signification system and utterances is seen as an either-or opposition: either one studies language systematically (i.e., as a signification system), or one doesn't study it at all. In this view, language is then something which precedes communication. It does this in two different ways: First, as a generic term for language utterances, and therefore as a synonym of performance, behavior, usage, and parole. Second, communication can be viewed as the context where language is used between communicators uttering tokens belonging to the signification schema, i.e., the language system. In both these views, language is seen as a precondition to communication, either as a structuring grammar of utterance tokens, or as a common code of some sort, defining the difference between what has meaning and what is meaningless. The code is necessary for communicators transferring a message, as in the conduit model (see above, Sect. 1.1),
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accomplishing a dialogue, as in the circular model (see Sect. 1.2), interacting with one another, as in the feedback model (see Sect. 1.3), or reaching a state of autopoesis, as in the self-regulatory model (see Sect. 1.4). 2.2 The Skepticist View Common to the skepticist view is the radical critique of the abstract objectivist opposition between the system of signification and the utterances derived from the system. The skepticists challenge this opposition in three different and not necessarily compatible ways. In all three, communication plays a more important role in research and reflection on language than in the abstract objectivist tradition. 2.2.1 Language as Communicative Behavior The skepticists' first option is to get rid of the opposition altogether. Language as a signification system is viewed as a mentalistic abstraction from a heterogeneous mass of data. This mentalistic abstraction is considered a type-schema product created by the analyst. Language is, then, a generic term for communicative behavior. This view is typical of the nominalist and the radical descriptivist. A prominent group of philosophers of language embracing these ideas are the so-called 'analytic philosophers' in the Anglo-American tradition (e.g., the later Wittgenstein, Strawson, Grice, Quine, Goodman). Meaning of linguistic messages in communication can only be said to belong to a signification system as an arbitrary classification of intentional (or habitual) acts having some sort of common similarity, the so-called 'family concepts'. An abstract objectivist theory of meaning, such as the (Saussurean) structuralist theory of semantic components and fields is in principle impossible, since in any case, message meaning is determined by an infinite number of components in a steadily changing communication situation, where intention, contextual setting, contextual restriction and other situational components play a major role. 2.2.2 Communication as Determining Language The second option turns the abstract objectivist view upside down. It claims that communication (as a set of messages, not utterances) precedes, and is a precondition of, the signification system, not the other way round. Communication is viewed as determining language. Language is a message structure (Rommetveit) embedded in time, which at the same time structures, constructs, and creates meaning as the result of an ongoing dialogic process. This view of language is closely related to the circular communication model (see above, Sect. 1.2), but it can also be seen as related to the non-intentional search for a common code which makes communication work in

Communication the interaction model (see Sect. 1.3), and to the notion of consensual domains as prerequisite for the process of communication in the autopoesis model (see Sect. 1.4). Many linguists involved in a sociological description of language choose this option. Approaching language from the corpus of messages, and not from a hypothetical, abstract system, one is struck by the heterogeneity of the data. Not only is communication a multi-dimensional semiotic, where verbal and written language play a subordinate role (as in phenomena of the 'double bind' type), but communicators may use different signification systems simultaneously, or even systematically break such systems' unconscious normative rules. This heterogeneity in communicative activity could be interpreted as a process of signification whose variation is an index of the conflicts between different, incompatible signification schemes. An example of how such a linguistic heterogeneity and flexibility in verbal communication can be legalized as the norm of a national written language is furnished by the two standards of written Norwegian. These standards represent two languages, in fact two competing conceptions of what constitutes 'Norwegian.' Since these conceptions are socio-culturally determined, the languages could be called written sociolects. In each language, a great number of morphemic and lexemic variants are admitted. For instance, the following are all possible determiners of the singular substantive bok 'book': bok-en, bok-a, bok-i 'the book.' On the lexical level, variation is allowed, where other written languages normally would have only one lexeme. For instance, two variants for the lexeme 'language' are possible: sprog, sprak. Morphological variants such as these have different social, political, stylistic, regional, etc. meanings dependent on context and genre; these different meanings are familiar to every relatively languagecompetent Norwegian. For a descriptive, synchronic grammar of written Norwegian which pretends to be exhaustive, it is thus necessary to allow for situational rules, sociological parameters, and the like. It is not in principle possible to reduce the morphemes -en, -a, -i to a single abstract archimorpheme, or the lexemes sprog, sprak to one and only one invariant ideal. In fact, the history of written Norwegian in the twentieth century is characterized by a willingness on the part of the language planners to accept a great many variants, because of these variants' different meanings in different contexts and situations. Interestingly enough, this sociologically determined multidimensionality seems to be one of the crucial factors that explains why Norwegians generally are much better at understanding their closely related neighbors, the Swedes and the Danes (who use written codes of the more uni-functional type), than the other way round. 2.2.3 Communication and Language as Complementary Phenomena The third alternative to the abstract objectivist view of language and communication is to claim that the elements in the opposition are complementary to each other. Language is both a signification system and communication (understood as a set of messages); this relation cannot be understood as an either-or. Therefore, language phenomena are conceived of as a process (i.e., communication of messages) and a product (i.e., a signification system), both at the same time. Which aspect one focuses upon is determined by one's theoretical model and one's more or less explicit interests in the study of verbal messages. As a signification system, language is viewed as an open system or semiosis. The system is not finite, but as a social reality, it is open for modifications of different kinds, such as restructuring and creativity during communication. The signification system thus has the form of a variation grammar, a system of multifunctional potentialities, allowing for orderly variation and flexible regularities. These regularities can be described not in the form of abstract 'rules,' 'principles,' and the like, but as social norms or even potential 'resources,' i.e., arbitrary conventions grounded in communication. More specifically, grammar is conceived of as a network of relations: a systemic network, not a system of rules. From the communication angle, language can be viewed as some socially controllable elaboration and/or modification of an earlier established reality, i.e., an already internalized system. But communication-as-language can also be conceived of as the creation of such a system. One consequence of this language conception is seen in our understanding of the language acquisition process. In this process, the child is not interpreted as a passive agent, but as an active and meaning-seeking organism trying to adapt itself during either the dialogue, interaction, or selfregulation process, towards an environment and other communicators in the environment. Furthermore, this conception neutralizes one of the classical oppositions in the abstract, objectivist conception of language, namely that between diachronic and synchronic. As a communication process, language seeks a stability that can never be achieved. Diachronicity is an inherent quality of language; the synchronic is merely a fixation of this diachronic quality, necessitated uniquely by the conscious rationalization of a supposed mutual intelligibility, by the need for an abstract, objectivist description of language, or by the language planner's urge for codification; for all of these, translating process to product is an essential demand. 3. Linguistics and Communication The phenomena of communication have often been thought of as peripheral in linguistic research. This

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Truth and Meaning
view is a result of the strong hold the abstract objectivist language conception has had on modern linguistic thought. Most workers in this tradition share (implicitly or explicitly) the idea that the essence of language is to represent some intellectual structure; thus, they reduce communication to a subordinate place amongst the possible functions of language. Some linguistic schools have advocated a more communication-relevant approach to language; here, one could name the Prague School, and different versions of linguistic functionalism. This low status attributed to communication is similarly challenged by different pragmatic approaches to language, as well as by language-relevant research in related disciplines such as sociology, poetics, psychology, or anthropology. Only some of the more important and coherent attempts of such communication-relevant approaches to language will be mentioned here. 3.1 Soviet Semiotic Dialogism In the pre-Stalin era of Soviet intellectual life, a group of scholars emerged with a more or less common view of language, cognition, and communication; the language philosopher V. N. Voloshinov, the psychologist L. S. Vygotsky, and the literary critic M. M. Bakhtin. All these scholars launched an attack on the basic ideas of abstract objectivism. For political reasons, it took a long time before their ideas reached the western world, but since the late 1960s, their approach to humanistic studies has come to play an increasingly important role in a great number of humanistic disciplines such as psychology, sociology, poetics, philosophy, semiotics, and linguistics. The basic idea of these scholars is that language is essentially dialogic. This dialogicity is not to be mistaken for a possible external, instrumental use of language; it is dialogic in its most radical sense, i.e., that of the inner dialectic quality of the language sign. The addresser and the addressee are integrated as part of the nature of language. Language never exists as a uni-functional, closed system: rather, it is a process of communication. This process is furthermore characterized by the notions of multiaccentuality, heterogeneity, polyphony, intertextuality, and in particular 'voicing', all referring to the social nature of language. In communication, language never appears as single-voiced: the situation, the tradition, the power relations between the communicators, and so on, all place their mark in the message. Thus, language really is this multivoiced message or speech process. The Soviet dialogists see the nature of language as fundamentally social. The study of the content plane of linguistic messages becomes part of the study of ideology, whereas the object of study of the expression plane are the so-called speech genres. Consequently, even cognition is interpreted as a communication process, or, as it is called: 'inner speech.' Cognition or 'thought' is only possible through language; language is this multiaccentuated interaction process. It remains to be seen whether the ideas of the Soviet dialogists can stimulate the traditional study of languages and language in the same way as they have influenced psychology and text linguistics. But one linguistic theory has emerged which partly seems to have been inspired by this school: namely the theory of enunciation and polyphony, developed above all by the French linguist Oswald Ducrot. This theory not only focuses on the self-referential aspects of language, such as deictic elements and shifters, but also on the fact that each message may have more than one source, and therefore may represent several points of view. These qualities are grammaticalized in language, for instance in the system of modalities. One consequence of the theory is that the monolithic notion of the addresser's integrity is suspended. 3.2 The Prague School and Functionalism The Prague School was a linguistic school which did not limit its study of language to isolated utterances in so-called 'normal' situations. Quite the contrary: its focus was on a number of different types of human communication where language was used as a tool, such as literature and film. The school's basic relevance for the study of communication lies in the Prague linguists' development of a process theory of syntax, based on the notions of theme and rheme. Theme and rheme refer to the different linguistic qualities in the message which, in the communication process, signal already given meaning as 'theme,' and introduce new meaning as 'rheme.' An even more important contribution to a communicative approach to language study is the Prague School's development of different taxonomies of socalled communicative functions. These taxonomies play an important role in Trubetzkoy's phonological theory. Another linguist (who is often associated with the Prague school), Andre Martinet, also challenges the traditional view of the basic function of language as representation. To Martinet, language is an instrument for communication. Martinet's stance appears to stem (at least in part) from his view on language as serving the need for mutual understanding. This 'sociological' attitude may also be prompted by Martinet's interest in what he calls the 'vocal basis' of language and by his studies in diachronic phonology. This basic communicative function of language could, e.g., explain why certain phonemes do not merge, and why the distinctive values of a language system are retained, even though its substance is fundamentally changed. Like the Soviet dialogists, but perhaps in a less radical fashion, the Praguians refuse to reduce the essence of language's functions to intellectual representation. To them, language is a polyfunctional potential: its different functions are grammaticalized

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Communication at different strata in the language system. Moreover, each individual utterance of a language is seen as a potential which in the interpretation process is reduced and given a coherent structure. Interpretation thus happens according to a more or less conscious choice of what is called a 'dominant': among the possible functions of an utterance in a specific communicative situation, the one is picked that is felt to be the most important for the message. It was in this way that Roman Jakobson explained the poetic quality of language: not as something extrinsic, but as an inherent quality. 3.3 Rommetveit's Message Structure Theory The Norwegian psycholinguist Ragnar Rommetveit developed his theory of message structure over the years 1968-90, often in opposition to dominant paradigms in American linguistic research, such as Generative Grammar and Montague Grammar. The theoretical basis for his theory is a combination of experimental psychology (e.g., experiments with word associations), G. H. Mead's symbolic interactionism, and the European hermeneutic tradition. In fact, Rommetveit has made a point of being a methodical pluralist. Rommetveit's basic idea is that language is embedded in a social matrix or context. Language can never be studied in isolation from the interaction of context. The analysis of interaction and communication is then related to the actual needs, feelings, intentions, and understanding of the subjects involved and their life worlds. Therefore, meaning is necessarily bound to context. Rommetveit attacks all ideas about 'literal' meaning, minimal semantic universals, etc., as fantasies based on theories of language that are in reality theories of written, formal language. On the content plane, messages are considered to be so-called 'meaning potentials.' Rommetveit, without being a nihilist, advocates a theory of perspectival relativity, in keeping with the sociological perspective of his theory. The social nature of language is guaranteed by so-called 'drafts of contracts.' Contracts are seen as a process of negotiating tacit agreement and a shared world of discourse; the process is characterized by the notion of message structure. In the process of structuring a message, the communicators try to build a temporarily shared social reality. The message structure consists of cyclic patterns of nesting new (or, as it is called, 'free') information into given (or 'bound') information. To the theoretical-oriented linguist, Rommetveit's theory appears to be somewhat limited, as it seldom focuses on what the theory means in terms of the grammar. It is basically an interaction theory which focuses on the content plane of messages, not on the structure of the sign vehicles. 3.4 Halliday's Socio-semiotic Theory of Language As a student of the English linguist J. R. Firth , M. A. K. Halliday was also influenced (albeit indirectly) by the anthropologist Malinowski. Consequently, he has referred to his theory as an 'ethnographic or descriptive grammar.' Language, or as it is called, the combination of a 'semantic,' a 'lexico-grammatical,' and a 'phonological system,' is studied as the product of a social process, a social reality is schematized (or 'encoded') as a semantic system. However, among the systems that construct culture (the semiotic systems, as they are called), language is just one, even though it has a privileged place: most other semiotic systems are obligatorily mediated through language and its system. The product of the social process is the 'code'; human behavior is essential for its explanation. In Halliday's words the 'system is determined by the process.' Typical of Halliday, then, is the endeavor to explain the structure of language as a consequence of social dialogue, of which it is in some way an abstraction. As this dialogic process is determined by the exchange of commodities, language is both determined by the nature of the commodity (such as 'goods and services' versus 'information'), and by the rules defined for the commodity exchange (such as 'giving' and 'demanding'). However, this is not a monolithic process: language develops characteristic realizations at its different levels in accordance with what Halliday calls 'congruence patterns.' Thus, Halliday's theory of language is structured as a system network, where the expression plane is conceived of as manifestations of meanings chosen from a semantic system (the encoded social reality). While the notion of 'choice' is central to Halliday, it should not be mistaken for a conscious act of choosing, but understood as a term referring to the processual nature of the socio-semiotic system of language.
4. Future Work

A great deal of what has been discussed above is often classified as belonging to the domain of 'pragmatics' in linguistics. But if pragmatics is conceived as a superficial attribution to, or even as a 'waste-basket' for the more systematic, and therefore more prestigious, studies of syntax and semantics, this is a misrepresentation. Among the fundamentally radical views that some of the most important communication-oriented linguists share, not least the four 'schools' explicitly mentioned here have inspired, or are still systematically searching for, such an alternative. For the linguist who is skeptical about most of the traditional conceptions in linguistics associated with what has been referred to here as 'abstract objectivism,' there exist several research alternatives.
Bibliography Bakhtin M M 1981 The Dialogic Imagination. University of Texas Press, Austin, TX Bourdieu P 1982 Ce que parler veut dire. Libraire Artheme

A simple formulation of the principle of compositionality one often encounters is:
The meaning of a compound expression is a function of the meanings of its parts.

discussions are mentioned. For a more extensive discussion see Janssen 1997.
1. Theoretical Preliminaries

Thus formulated, the principle is immediately appealing and widely accepted. It may well be that much of its attraction derives from the fact that this formulation contains certain terms which call for a specific interpretation, such as meanings, parts, and function. In theories of natural language that primarily deal with syntax this principle does not play an important role. Moreover, there is much research in the semantics of natural language that focuses on the semantic aspects, and where natural language is treated as a source of problems, but where the principle is not part of the descriptive aims (e.g., when designing a model for tense in natural language). The principle is, however, important in theories where meaning is investigated in its relation to syntax. It is, for instance, the fundamental principle of Montague Grammar (see Montague 1970). There the principle of compositionality of meaning is given a precise interpretation, which has led to interesting discussions with practitioners of other theories of grammar. In this article, the important features of this interpretation are discussed and some of the issues raised in the
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If one considers natural language, it becomes immediately clear that knowing the meanings of the parts is not sufficient for determining the meaning of the complete sentence. Parts may form several sentences with differences in meaning. An example is Suzy married, thereafter Suzy got a baby versus Suzy got a baby, thereafter Suzy married. One has to know how the parts fit together. The notion 'parts' is, therefore, always interpreted as including the information in which way they are parts. Since the syntactic rules give information on how the expressions are formed, a connection with syntax seems obvious. Several authors make this explicit in their formulation of the principle. One formulation expressing this is:
The meaning of a compound expression is a function of the meanings of its parts and of the syntactic rule by which they are combined. (Partee, et al. 1990:318)

In this formulation some theoretical assumptions are implicit. The formulation assumes that a distinction is made between two aspects of sentences, i.e., the way in which the expressions are generated in the syntax, and their meanings. The principle is necessarily at odds with any theory not distinguishing these

Compositionality of Meaning two. The formulation also assumes that the syntactic rules determine what the parts are, whereas the first formulation only assumes structures, no matter how they are given. The formulation regards the syntax as the input for meaning assignment, and the principle then describes how the meanings are projected from this input. It is instructive to look at these assumptions in the light of a grammatical theory like generative semantics. This theory distinguishes two structural levels, one called 'semantic' and the other 'surface.' The grammar or syntax consists of formation rules for the semantic structures and a gradual transformational mapping procedure between semantic and surface structures. Here the syntactic form is projected from the meanings, and the semantic structures provide the compositional framework for a calculus producing meanings. Under certain assumptions this process is in accordance with the first formulation of the principle of compositionality of meaning, but not with the formulation given in this section.
2. Interpretation of Compositionality

the syntax which provides the rules for the formal construction of expressions we shall let the syntax determine what the parts of an expression are. Different syntactic theories may assign different structures. Consider, for example, the English sentence Mary does not cry. A grammar might distinguish the main constituents Mary and does not cry, but it may also impose a tripartite structure consisting of Mary, does not and cry. A theory might also neglect constituents, focusing on logical aspects, and have a negation rule that takes the positive sentence Mary cries as its onepart input. This means that 'part' is a technical notion, that only coincides with intuitions for certain kinds of rules, to which one may wish to restrict the theory. Parts of sentences may have parts themselves, and so on. Usually this analysis stops at the level of words or word stems. In logical grammar, lexical words such as love or know are left unanalyzed and considered to correspond with semantic primitives. Words like all and only, on the other hand, are analyzed further in the semantics with the help of logical tools. 2.3 Parts Have Meanings The principle presupposes that parts have meanings. This excludes approaches in which only complete sentences can be semantically interpreted. More to the point, the principle requires that all expressions arising as structural parts have an independently given meaning. For some structural parts it is easy to imagine intuitively what their meaning specification should be. A verb phrase like loves Mary, for example, is immediately interpretable on an intuitive level. Not all parts, however, have a semantic interpretation that is readily supported by intuition. Constituents like only Mary, for example, in the sentence John loves only Mary, or whether John comes in Mary knows whether John comes, seem less readily interpretable on purely intuitive grounds. But compositionality requires that we choose a meaning. The criterion for such a choice is then whether the meaning is a suitable ingredient for building the meaning of the whole expression. 2.4 The Role of Derivational History The meaning of an expression is determined by the way in which it is formed from parts. The derivational history of an expression is, therefore, the input to the process of determining its meaning. Since the compositionality principle, based on such part-whole relations, is taken to give a complete characterization of how the meaning of an expression is computed, there is no other input to the process of meaning assignment than the derivational history of the sentence in question. No outside factors are allowed to have an effect on the meaning of a sentence. This applies for instance to contextual factors: the Montagovian perspective does not allow for any kind of 'discourse' input to the compositional calculus determining the meaning of an expression. The most it

The interpretation of the principle of compositionality provided in Montague Grammar (and in other forms of logical grammar as well) is an application of the essential methods of formal logic to the study of natural language semantics (for a more extensive discussion, see Gamut 1991; Janssen 1997). The main features are the following. 2.1 Rule-to-rule Correspondence The syntax contains several rules and thus provides several ways to form a compound from parts. Each of these possibilities may have its own semantic effect. Therefore, for each syntactic rule there is a corresponding semantic function expressing the semantic effect of that rule, i.e., for each syntactic rule there is a corresponding semantic rule. This is known as the rule-to-rule correspondence. This correspondence asks for a uniform method to obtain the meaning of the resulting expression. It does not, however, imply that each syntactic rule should produce a change in meaning: the semantic rule corresponding with a syntactic rule can be the semantic identity function. Neither does it imply that every detail of a syntactic rule has a semantic counterpart. For instance, in English, the rule for yes-no question formation as well as certain other constructs involves Subject-Aux inversion. This inversion occurs in some rules of syntax, yet it does not seem to have any semantic effects. One might use a terminology in which such operations are called 'subroutines' of rules. 2.2 'Part' is a Theoretical Concept The principle of compositionality speaks about the parts of an expression, which implies that it has to be determined somehow what these parts are. As it is

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Truth and Meaning allows for in this respect is an admission of ambiguity of the expression involved. If one wishes discourse factors to contribute to meaning, the notion of meaning must be enriched in order to incorporate such factors (see Sect. 3 below). 2.5 Ambiguities are Lexical or Derivational Ambiguities may simply be lexical. If they are not, the principle of compositionality of meaning as applied in Montague Grammar allows for only one alternative source: a difference in the derivational history. This has certain consequences for the theory. Suppose, for example, that one takes the sentence, 'Every Belgian speaks two languages.' to be ambiguous between a reading in which there are two languages that are spoken by every Belgian, and one in which, merely, every Belgian is bilingual. The Montagovian compositionality principle now requires that the ambiguity resides either in the words or in the derivational history of this sentence. The former option being less likely, the syntax will have to be such as to reflect at least two different derivational histories of this sentence. Semantic decisions are thus seen to impose conditions on the syntax. In Montague Grammar, syntax and semantics, though distinct, are thus forced to remain in step with each other. acceptable since it does not correspond with an operation on meanings. This is evident from the fact that it has different effects on the two equivalent meaning representations <p A *!/ and i^ A <p. The above discussion, however, only makes sense if one takes meanings to be abstract entities. In some theories such as discourse representation theory (Kamp 1981, henceforth DRT) meaning representations are an essential ingredient of the semantic theory. This claim of DRT is linked with the postulation of the psychological relevance of their representations. In such a theory, operations on representations of meaning are, of course, acceptable. For such operations the issue of compositionality can be raised as well, but it becomes a different issue. Thus two extremes have been met: no use of representations and total dependency on them. There are also theories that lie somewhere in between; for instance, some theories for anaphora essentially use the indices of variables (for a discussion see Landman and Moerdijk 1983).

4. The Status of Compositionality The principle of compositionality implies no restrictions on the rules of syntax. We know that a rich variety of rules is needed. A rule is needed, for example, to introduce the verb do in the negative sentence 3. Representations of Meanings Mary does not cry, and one to ensure the correct Meanings are, in Montague Grammar and in almost morphological form does, or cries in Mary cries. In all semantic theories, considered to be model-theoretic general, rules may perform permutations, insertions entities, such as truth values, sets of a certain kind, or and deletions, and have therefore the same power as functions of a certain type. Usually these abstract Turing machines or Chomsky type-0 grammars. The entities are represented by means of an expression in principle implies no restrictions either on the nature some logical language (e.g., Vx[man(x) -»mortal(x)]). of meanings or on the operations that can be perThese representations are not themselves meanings, formed on them. It can be proven that, in such a and should not be confused with them. Differences in system, any sentence can be assigned any meaning representation do not always constitute a difference in a compositional way (see Janssen 1986a; 1997). in meaning: ^ A q> and <p A ty express the same mean- Compositionality, therefore, implies no restriction on ing. And logically equivalent expressions are equally the final results that can be obtained. Without good as representations for some meaning. A semantic additional empirical constraints compositionality has theory cannot be based on accidental properties of no empirical content. For this reason the principle of meaning representations, since then it would be a the- compositionality in Montague Grammar is not conory about representations and not the meanings them- sidered to be a claim about natural language, but merely a methodological or heuristic principle, i.e., a selves. As has been shown above, there is for each syntactic criterion for evaluating theories (not all theories that rule a corresponding semantic rule that says how the have been proposed are compositional). meaning of the compound expression depends on the As such it has proved its value. Proposals that do meanings of the parts. Since these meanings are rep- not satisfy the compositionality criterion often turn resented by logical expressions, it seems natural to out to be inadequate precisely at the points where they represent such functions by means of an operation on infringe the principle. Janssen (1986b; 1997) discusses logical expressions. This operation has to represent an several proposals from the literature that do not obey operation on meanings and therefore it should not compositionality, in the sense sketched in Sect. 3. It is make use of accidental properties of the meaning rep- shown that those proposals have unacceptable logical resentation. For instance, the operation 'enclose the consequences, and that by reformulating the underformula between brackets and write a negation sign lying ideas in a compositional way, they gain in genin front of it' is acceptable since it corresponds with erality and empirical adequacy. Now a more elaborated illustration of the heuristic the semantic operation of negation. But the operation 'negate the second conjunct of the formula' is not value of the principle will be considered. It has to
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Compositionality of Meaning do with discourse pronouns. Let us consider first the relevant phenomena on the basis of the following two discourses:
A man walks in the park. He whistles. Not all men do not walk in the park. He whistles. (1) (2)

In (1), the pronoun he in the second sentence is interpreted as anaphorically linked to the term a man in the first sentence. This is not possible in (2), where he has to refer to a third party. The meanings of (1) and (2) are, therefore, different. And since the second sentences of (1) and (2) are identical, we must look to the first sentence to find the meaning difference:
A man walks in the park. Not all men do not walk in the park.
(3) (4)

only for the phenomena that are treated in DRT, but for other phenomena as well (see Groenendijk and Stokhof 1991). Thus it is seen that the attempt to stay compositional led in a certain direction. Since this approach has its intrinsic value, it is not surprising that, independently of any compositionality requirement, it is proposed by other authors as well, e.g., Seuren 1985. For more discussion, see van Eyck and Kamp 1997.
5. Formalization of the Principle

These two sentences are logically equivalent. If meaning is taken to be identical to truth-conditions, as is customary, then (3) and (4) have the same meaning. But so do the second sentences of (1) and (2). Therefore, if the meaning of each discourse, (1) and (2), were a function of the meaning of the constituent sentences, (1) and (2) would have identical meanings, which is contrary to fact. This phenomenon thus seems to provide an argument against the assumption of compositionality in discourses. In discourse representation theory, meaning representations constitute an essential level. There, (3) and (4) are assigned different representations. The two negation signs in the representation of (4) trigger different interpretation strategies for the discourse. This is one of the ways in which the difference between DRT and compositional grammars becomes evident. Nevertheless, a compositional treatment for this kind of phenomenon is quite feasible and, in fact, the principle itself points to a solution. Since the two discourses (1) and (2) have different meanings, and their second sentences are identical, the difference. must reside in their first sentences, i.e., (3) and (4). And since (3) and (4) have identical truth-conditions, a richer notion of meaning is required if the principle of compositionality is to be saved for discourses. Truth-conditions of sentences (which involve possible worlds and assignments to free variables) are just one aspect of meaning. Another aspect is that the preceding discourse has a bearing on the interpretation of a sentence (and especially of the so-called discourse pronouns). Moreover the sentence itself extends this discourse and thus has a bearing on sentences that follow it. Thus a notion of meaning is required which takes into account the semantic contribution that a sentence makes to a discourse. Sentences (3) and (4) make different contributions to the meaning of the discourse, especially concerning the interpretation of later discourse pronouns. These ideas have led to dynamic predicate logic and dynamic Montague Grammar, a compositional theory that accounts not

As the rules of grammar specify the structural parts of an expression, they can be regarded as operators taking input expressions and delivering output expressions. Mathematically speaking, this means that they are considered operators in an algebra of expressions, turning the grammar into an algebra. The notion 'part of an expression' is defined as 'being the input to a rule forming that expression.' As has been shown above, the meaning of an expression is determined by its derivational history. This means, mathematically speaking, that meaning assignment is a function that is defined on the elements of the term algebra over the grammar for the source language. The principle of compositionality also describes the character of meaning assignment. Suppose an expression is obtained by application of operation f to arguments a, , . . . , an , hence with the derivational history f(a, , . . . , an). Then the meaning in a model should be obtained from the meanings of its parts, hence by application of an operator g (corresponding with f ) to the meanings of T(f(a] , . . . , an)). If T denotes the meaning function, then: The meaning assignment is thus seen to be a homomorphism. These considerations produce the following formalization of the principle: A compositional meaning assignment of language A is obtained by designing an algebra (A,Fy as syntax for A, an algebra (B, (?) as a semantic model, and by letting the meaning assignment be a homomorphism from the term algebra over A to <£, G>. Since there is no restriction on the operators, any language that can be generated by some algorithm (i.e., any recursively enumerable language) can be described by a compositional grammar. Furthermore, it can be shown that every meaning assignment to sentences can be put in the form of a homomorphism. If some logic is used to represent meanings, <A, F> is in fact translated into expressions from a logical algebra <C, H>. This algebra is then homomorphically interpreted in the semantic algebra <B, G>. The requirement that meaning assignment be compositional is guaranteed if one translates into polynomials over <C, H>. This model is introduced in Montague (1970). For an introduction see Halvorsen

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Truth and Meaning and Ladusaw (1979), and Janssen (1986a) for a detailed description of the mathematical model.
6. Objections Against Compositionality

Several objections have been raised against compositionality. Some authors, investigating phenomena that seem to call for a noncompositional solution, argue that natural language is not compositional at all. But often a non-compositional proposal can be replaced by a compositional one, which then not only turns out to solve the original problem but also has a wider area of application. Partee (1984) considers many phenomena where context seems to play a role, e.g., the different interpretations of the subjects in 'the horse is widespread' versus 'the horse is in the barn.' She refers in some cases to proposals in the literature where a satisfactory and compositional solution is given, but other phenomena remain a challenge. Not all phenomena of natural language have (yet) found a compositional solution. And those solutions that have been or can be proposed are of course always open to further debate. In all cases, however, the right question to ask is not whether a compositional treat- 7. Why Compositionality? ment is in principle possible (it always is), but what An interpretation of the principle of Compositionality price has to be paid, or what the reward of a com- of meaning has been discussed here, and somewhat implicitly, the argument has been in favor of it. A positional solution is. A different objection, of a more methodological theoretical argument is that Compositionality makes nature, concerns the various kinds of meanings used for an attractive framework in which semantic probin Montague Grammar. If meanings are built from lems are dealt with as locally as possible, the various meanings of structural parts, then meanings of parts solutions being combined into larger wholes. Comtend to become highly abstract. One kind of meaning positionality thus provides a strategy for dealing with which has proved to be of great use is the type of the complexities of language. A practical argument term phrases, which led to the theory of generalized is that experience has taught us that observance of quantifiers. But other kinds seem to be motivated Compositionality usually leads to better solutions, only by the wish to keep the system compositional. which makes it a useful and attractive heuristic device. Montague Grammar has been criticized for its apparent willingness to accept any kind of abstract entity in See also: Montague Grammar. the semantic domain. And indeed, if one expects of a semantic theory that it not only accounts for the semantic phenomena of language but, in addition, Bibliography does so under certain philosophical constraints, such Gamut L T F 1991 Logic. Language and Meaning. Vol. II: Intensional Logic and Logical Grammar. University of as maximal simplicity of the used elements, then there Chicago Press, Chicago can be a problem. Compositionality is not an empirically verifiable Gazdar G, Klein E, Pullum G, Sag 11985 Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar. Basil Blackwell, Oxford property of natural language. Compositional rules, Groenendijk J, Stokhof M 1991 Dynamic predicate logic. powerful as they are, can seem quite counter intuitive. Linguistics and Philosophy 14:39-100 There are authors who reject Compositionality for this Halvorsen P K, Ladusaw W A 1979 Montague's 'Universal reason, or replace it by a more restrictive version. One Grammar.' An introduction for the linguist. Linguistics and Philosophy 3:185-223 may propose to restrict it to grammars in which the derivations are closer to the surface form. However, Hausser R 1984 Surface Compositional Grammar. W. Fink, Munich if restricted too much, the principle may no longer be applicable to natural language, and its advantages will Janssen T M V 1986a Foundations and Applications of Montague Grammar. Pan I: Foundations. Logic, Computer be lost. Several proposals for restrictions have been Science. CWI Tract 19. Center for Mathematics and Comput forward. Partee (1979) proposed to use only a few puter Science, Amsterdam basic syntactic operations. Generalized phrase struc- Janssen T M V 1986b Foundations and Applications of Monture grammar (Gazdar, et al. 1985) can be seen as a tague Grammar. Part 2: Applications to Natural Language. form of Montague Grammar in which only contextCWI Tract 28. Center for Mathematics and Computer Science, Amsterdam free rules are used, and categorial grammar can be

seen as an even more restricted form. Hausser (1984) aims at what he calls 'surface compositional grammars.' An argument against Compositionality sometimes raised by grammarians in the Chomsky tradition has to do with the position of syntax in a compositional grammar. They defend the principle of the autonomy of syntax, which is meant to specify the well-formedness conditions of sentences on syntactic grounds only. As has been shown in Sect. 2.5, a compositional grammar, being homomorphically connected with the semantics (so that every non-lexical ambiguity is syntax-based), allows for semantic considerations to have relevance for the selection and formulation of the rules of syntax. The very notion of autonomous syntax thus implies a rejection of such semantic considerations in syntax. But, as Gamut (1991:148) says, 'It remains an open question whether this potential transgression of the autonomy of syntax by semantics will be encountered in reality, that is, in the actual description of some natural language.'

A rough idea of what concepts are can be gleaned from the statement that to possess the concept of an F (say, an uncle) is to know what it is for something to be an F (an uncle). Evidently there is a close relationship between knowing the meaning of a word and possessing the concept expressed by that word. If you know the meaning of uncle then you will possess the concept of an uncle. However, the converse does not hold. You may possess the concept of an uncle yet not know the meaning of the English word uncle. This article focuses on concepts rather than their expression in any particular language, but the issues raised clearly have a bearing on the theoretical representation of word meanings. 1. Concepts and Prepositional Attitudes What is a concept? Abstractly considered a concept is an ingredient of the content of a prepositional attitude. If you believe that interest rates are too high the content of your belief is given by the proposition that interest rates are too high. The concept of interest rates and the concept of what it is for such rates to be too high are ingredients of that proposition. What is it to possess a concept? A plausible, if minimal, answer is that to possess a concept is to possess abilities which are exercised in the management of propositional attitudes whose contents contain the concept as an ingredient. Suppose that you believe that Bill is kind. Then you have an attitude to the proposition that Bill is kind, namely, the attitude of taking the proposition to be true. Now if you are capable of forming such an attitude you will also be capable of forming an indefinite number of similar attitudes to the effect that such-and-such a person is kind, for example, the beliefs that Mary is kind, that John is kind, that Zelda

is kind, etc. So it seems natural to think of the abilities in which possessing the concept of being kind consists as including the ability to form beliefs of this type. Similarly, if you want Bill to be kind then, arguably, you have an attitude to the proposition that Bill is kind, this time the attitude of wanting it to be true. Abilities associated with the concept of being kind would be exercised in the formation of such desires. The concept of being kind is predicative insofar as it is expressible by means of a predicate. Not all concepts are of this predicative type. Suppose you believe that if interest rates stay high then the government will lose the election. One may think of the formation of that belief as involving the exercise of abilities which in English are associated with the conditional Ifthen—. These abilities could be exercised in relation to an indefinite number of other beliefs having the same conditional form. By analogy with descriptive concepts they may be taken to be at least partially constitutive of what it is to possess the logical concept expressible by If—then—. Among examples of other logical concepts are those expressible by and, not, and either—or— . The approach just outlined might be thought to apply also to proper names like John and Fido. After all, if you believe that John is bald then you are exercising abilities which may also be exercised in the formation of other beliefs to the effect that John is suchand-such. Why not regard such abilities as constitutive of possession of a concept associated with the proper name John! If this terminology is adopted great care must be taken in spelling out precisely what such abilities amount to. There are well-known difficulties in equating the concept associated with a proper name
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Truth and Meaning with the concept expressed by some singular description which applies to the bearer of the name. 2. Conceptual Abilities If the approach proposed above is along the right lines then a major task for a theory of concepts is to specify the structures of diverse conceptual abilities (see Peacocke 1992). Granted that conceptual abilities are implicated in the management of beliefs one needs to know what form these abilities take. Clearly, conceptual abilities are exercised when beliefs are formed on the basis of other beliefs. For example, if you come to believe that interest rates will remain high and you already believe that if interest rates remain high then the government will lose the election then you may, on the basis of these beliefs, form the belief that the government will lose the election. It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that whenever you possess the concept of the conditional If—then— , and believe a particular proposition of the form If p then q, you will form the belief that q provided that you come to believe that p. People do not routinely believe even the obvious implications of what they already believe. Much depends on their current interests and on the extent to which the current beliefs are liable to become activated. Often when one forms a belief that p on the basis of beliefs that q,r,... one does so unreflectively. Think of seeing bottles of milk outside a neighbor's apartment and coming to believe that the neighbor is still in bed. In these circumstances one would probably not spell out to oneself the relevant premises nor any inference from these premises yielding the relevant conclusion. One would simply come to have a belief in response to the interaction between a perceptionbased belief and various stored beliefs. But people do sometimes reason in a manner which involves explicitly taking account of inferential links between propositions. Such reasoning brings into play the ability to discriminate between valid and invalid inferences and that ability is arguably a further aspect of what is involved in possessing the relevant concepts. So, for example, possessing the concept of the Ifthen— conditional would bring with it the ability to recognize as valid inferences which instantiate the pattern modus ponens: Ifp then q. p. Therefore q. 3. Concepts and 'Family Resemblance' Some predicative concepts have definitions spelling out characteristics, possession of which is necessary and sufficient for something to be an instance of the concept. This is true, for example, of kinship concepts like those of an uncle, father, mother, brother, etc. It is widely recognized that not all concepts have definitions in this sense and consequently that mastery of such concepts cannot be represented solely in terms of the ability to employ such definitions. Much of the discussion of this matter by psychologists and
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theoretical linguists, as well as philosophers, takes off from Wittgenstein's remarks about games (Wittgenstein 1958). Wittgenstein suggested that it is misguided to look for defining characteristics which are common to everything we regard as a game. Games are related by overlapping family resemblances. Each game shares some features with some other games though there may be no features which all games share. The idea of a family resemblance concept does not preclude the possibility of there being some features shared by all instances. But such features are not required and even when present are not definitive of the concept. Note that the application of family resemblance concepts has no clear boundaries since there is no determinate yes or no answer to the question whether putative new cases resemble agreed cases in appropriate ways. Where a concept is a family resemblance concept the abilities constitutive of its possession cannot plausibly be explicated in terms of a grasp of deductive inferential links between propositions to the effect that the concept applies to some thing and propositions ascribing denning characteristics to that thing. This may also be true of natural kind concepts (whether or not they are family resemblance concepts). It is certainly relevant to the mastery of the concept of a lemon that typical ripe lemons are seen as being yellow. Yet we seem to allow for the possibility that a thing may be a ripe lemon though not yellow. If this is so then being yellow when ripe cannot be a denning characteristic of lemons. Putnam has argued (Putnam 1975: ch. 8) that it may be wrong even to think that typical ripe lemons are yellow. Whether or not this is so, some account is required of the role in our thinking of those characteristics which are associated with what are regarded as typical instances of certain concepts, even if they are not defining characteristics for the concept. Further complications emerge when one takes into account the fact that many concepts can be applied on the basis of perception. One comes to have beliefs not only via other beliefs but also via current sensory experiences. On touching your cup of coffee you may come to believe that it is hot. It is arguable that mastery of the concept of being hot which most normal people employ essentially involves an ability to make such transitions from experiences to beliefs (Millar 1991). 4. The Normative Dimension of Concepts According to the approach sketched above the notion of a concept is helpful in describing certain types of ability which are exercised in thinking and, consequently, also in the use of language. Concepts have an explanatory role in that they enter into explanations of, among other things, the formation, maintenance, and abandonment of beliefs. An important feature of concepts is that they also have a normative

Convention dimension (see Brandom 1994). Concepts may be mistakenly or correctly employed and any abstract representation of what concepts are must illuminate what is involved in their correct employment. As suggested above, part of the story must have to do with inference. It may be that logical concepts are entirely individuated by means of patterns of legitimate (in this case deductively valid) inference. It seems plausible that many predicative concepts will be implicated in inferential links of some kind or other. Some such concepts will in addition embody standards for legitimate transitions from perception to belief.
5. Topics of Concern in the 1990s

Concepts form a focal point for overlapping theoretical concerns of linguists, psychologists, and philosophers. A very basic topic for further enquiry concerns the abstract representation of concepts and the characterization of conceptual abilities in terms of these representations. Such enquiries will have to take account of empirical work by psychologists on predicative concepts indicating that many concepts are associated with typicality effects. (Rosch and Mervis 1975; Rosch 1978 are classic papers. For useful surveys, see Roth and Frisby 1986; Smith 1988.) In the case of a concept like that of furniture, for example, subjects will regularly count chairs as more typical instances than radios. It seems also that instances of a given sort are regarded as typical in proportion to the extent to which they have family resemblances to instances of other sorts. Further, some concepts relate to categories which are basic in that there is a high level of family resemblance between the diverse sorts of instances which they include. How precisely these findings bear on the theoretical representation of concepts remains to be seen. A cardinal tenet of traditional empiricism is that all concepts are acquired. Fodor (1975) has argued that the very idea of acquiring a concept is paradoxical (see also Woodfield 1987). Certainly, one learns to associate concepts with linguistic expressions but, Fodor thinks, the most plausible account of how one does so assumes that one already possesses the concepts in question. This is one of the considerations which leads Fodor to posit a language of thought. The hypothesis of a language of thought is itself a

Convention
P. Pagin

While it might seem obvious to many that language is in some way or other conventional, or based on 'conventions,' the notion is remarkably difficult to

make precise and remains a matter of considerable controversy concerning, for example, the nature of linguistic conventions, how they arise in the first place,
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Truth and Meaning and by what means they are enforced. The most systematic, and widely debated, attempt to explain the concept of a convention comes from the philosopher David Lewis and it is his account that will provide the principal focus for this article. But the grounds on which some philosophers reject a convention-based account of language altogether will also be investigated. (For a fuller discussion of the related notion of a 'rule' applied to language see Rules.)
1. David Lewis's Account of the Concept of a Convention (b) almost everyone expects almost everyone else to conform to R (c) almost everyone has approximately the same preferences regarding all possible combinations of actions (d) almost everyone prefers that any one more conform to /?, on condition that almost everyone conforms to R (e) almost everyone would prefer that any one more conform to R', on condition that almost everyone conform to R' where R' is some possible regularity in the behavior of members of P in 5, such that almost noone in almost any instance of S among members of P could conform both lo R 'and to/?.

The idea that languages are conventional, that the meaning of a word is a matter of convention, is frequently entertained, though rarely with any accompanying conception of what a convention is. One cannot just adopt the familiar view of a convention as an explicit verbal agreement, since then the account becomes circular: conventions are needed for language and language is needed for conventions. It was not until David Lewis's work on the concept (Lewis 1969) that a fully developed alternative was available. Lewis built upon earlier work by T. C. Schelling on game theory (Schelling 1960) and by David Shwayder (1965) on the concept of a rule. The basic ideas are as follows. Conventions are regularities in action. Conventions are social, they concern interaction between members of a community, or population. Conventions coordinate actions of different members in particular types of situation. Conventions tend to perpetuate themselves since the existence of a convention in a population gives the members reasons of self-interest to conform to it. Conventions are arbitrary; where there is a convention to act in a certain way there are also other ways of acting that would achieve coordination equally well. A regularity in action is conventional only if there is, in a sense, knowledge in the population that the regularity is conventional; more precisely, members must know that other members conform for the same reason as they do themselves. One of Lewis's prime examples is the convention to drive on the right hand side of the road. This achieves coordination since there is a common interest of avoiding head-on collision. It is arbitrary, since keeping to the left would serve this interest equally well. Drivers prefer to keep to the right only insofar as they expect other drivers to keep to the right and they expect other drivers to prefer keeping to the right for the same reason. The final definition, (in Lewis 1969), runs as follows:
A regularity R in the behavior of members of a population P when they are agents in a recurrent situation S is a convention if and only if it is true that, and it is common knowledge in P that, in almost any instance of S among members of P: (a) almost everyone conforms to R

The notion of common knowledge, although defined differently by Lewis (1969), is roughly this: common knowledge in P that p means that almost everyone in P knows that p, and almost everyone in P knows that almost everyone in P knows that p, and almost everyone in P knows that almost everyone in P knows that almost everyone in P knows that p, and so on. The common knowledge condition in the definition is to ensure that members know that other members have the same reasons for conforming as they have themselves. Keeping to the right would not, according to Lewis, be a convention if everyone believed that everyone else kept to the right by sheer habit.
2. Criticism of Lewis's Account

Lewis's account has been widely appreciated and it undoubtedly captures important aspects of many social phenomena. It has also, however, been heavily criticized, mostly for being too strict in a number of ways, that is, for imposing conditions that are not necessary for something to be a convention. One such objection is that a convention need not be a regularity in action. It is perfectly possible, by means of explicit agreement, to create a convention for one particular occasion, e.g., a particular sign. Moreover, there may be social conventions which are not generally conformed to, not even in the majority of cases. There may well be conventions which create conformity even in the absence of any preference for conformity per se. Fashion in mode of dressing may simply influence people's tastes, but should be regarded as conventional nonetheless. A language is conventional even if speakers of the language are not aware of the possibility of alternative languages. It is, moreover, conventional even if the speakers deny that the meanings of its words are arbitrary. So the common knowledge requirement is too strong. These objections suggest that Lewis has overrationalized conventions. On the other hand, however, Lewis has also been criticized for not suc-

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Convention ceeding in making conformity fully rational. The reason for failure in this respect is that common knowledge of conditional preferences (that is, preference for conformity given that most others conform) does not yield a sufficient reason for believing that others will in fact conform, and hence not a sufficient reason for conformity on one's own part. 3. Lewis on Language Conventions On Lewis's conception, a possible language is an abstract entity, roughly an infinite set of sentences together with meanings and grammatical moods (this is more precisely specified in terms of functions, utterance occasions, and possible-worlds semantics). The notion of a convention enters the picture when it comes to explaining what makes a possible language the actual language of a population. The idea is that a possible language L is the actual language of a population P in case there is a convention, among members of P, of truthfulness in L. In conforming to such a convention, a member of P assertively utters a sentence of L only if that sentence is true (with respect to the utterance occasion), given the interpretation of that sentence as a sentence of L. In a later paper, (Lewis 1975), with a slightly different definition of the concept of a convention, the convention of truthfulness in L is replaced by a convention of truthfulness and trust in L. In either case it is intended that Grice's analysis of communication intentions shall result as a special case of conformity to a convention. To this proposal it is, inter alia, objected that either it presupposes that members of P can already think, independently of their capacity to speak L, or else the general convention reduces to a convention of truthfulness and trust simpliciter, which, if a convention at all, belongs to the moral rather than to the linguistic order. 4. Is Language Conventional? Lewis has claimed that the view that there are conventions of language is a platitude, something only a philosopher would dream of denying. It has, indeed, been denied by philosophers, but the more interesting kind of dissent has the form of denying that any fundamental properties of languages, or linguistic practices, can be acceptably explained by appeal to conventions, or rules. 4.1 Quine on Conventions and Semantic Rules As early as the mid-1930s, W. V. O. Quine attacked the view of the logical positivists that logical truth is conventional. The idea was that a logically true sentence, or rather a logically valid sentence schema, is true (valid) either directly in virtue of a convention, which holds of axioms, or indirectly, in virtue of consequences of conventions, which holds of theorems. The conventions in question govern the use of, and thus determine the meaning of, logical expressions such as and and if-then, or their symbolic counterparts. The first part of Quine's main objection (Quine 1976) was this: in order to arrive at the logical validity of the theorems, from the statements of the conventions, one must make inferences, and in those inferences one must already make use of logical properties of expressions occurring in those statements, particularly if-then. Since logical properties of expressions are determined by conventions it seems that a further convention is required, and so on. To this it may be replied that the problem arises only under the assumption that a convention must be formulated in advance of being adhered to, and that this assumption is false. Quine agrees that this reply is reasonable, but the second part of his objection is that appeal to unstated conventions runs the risk of reducing the notion of a convention to an empty label. This argument has been very influential. However, it has been objected against Quine that conventions governing the use of logical expressions should not have the form of if-then sentences but, for example, of deduction-rule schemata of other kinds. This reply is to some extent effective against the first part of Quine's argument, but not at all against the second. The empty-label theme was further pursued. Quine (1980) has inveighed against Carnap and others that notions such as synonymy, analytic truth, and necessary truth cannot be explained by appeal to semantic rules, simply for the reason that the notion of a semantic rule is as much in need of explanation as the other notions. Without such an explanation no more is known than that a semantic rule is something stated on a page under the heading 'semantic rules'. It might be said that what characterizes definitions, logical and mathematical truths, and other statements thought of as expressions of rules, or of consequences of rules, is that they are immune to revision; no observation, come what may, can render them false. Quine has stressed, however, that when the need to revise a theory arises because of new observations, then any part of that theory can be dropped, including statements that were once adopted as definitions; no statement is ultimately immune to revision. Moreover, there is no difference in principle between, say, a revision of logic and a revision of quantum theory, no acceptable reason for saying that the one is a change of rules and the other a change of theory. Quine has expressed appreciation of Lewis's analysis of the notion of a convention (in the foreword to Lewis 1969), but the problems of synonymy and related notions are not eliminated, since such notions are already made use of in Lewis's semantics of possible languages.

Ill

Truth and Meaning member of a speech community. This, too, is accepted 4.2 Davidson on the Appeal to Meaning Conventions Davidson (1984) has provided a different argument. by Davidson, but he denies that it requires the exisEven if the notion of a semantic rule, or meaning tence of a common language in the community. And convention, is tolerably clear, it does not have any indeed, the idea of the priority of the common lanexplanatory value. A shared meaning convention is guage is hard to make good theoretical sense of, unless not necessary—by adherence to which we all mean the conventionality, or normativity, of the common the same with our linguistic expressions—in order to language is assumed at the outset. In Davidson's mind the appeal to conventions is communicate, simply for the reason that we do not have to mean the same. It suffices that I know what misguided for a further reason. One cannot attribute you mean and you know what I mean. Neither do I the observing of conventions to creatures to whom one need any convention in order to know what you mean. cannot attribute beliefs and desires, and one cannot We can indeed be said to have, within a community, attribute beliefs and desires to creatures to whom one the convention of interpreting each other as meaning cannot attribute a language. Thus, having a language the same, even though from time to time, the assump- is a precondition of having a convention, but, as the tion of sameness of meaning, mostly concerning indi- earlier argument shows, not vice-versa. vidual words, must be revised. Without that convention, linguistic communication would be cum- See also: Analyticity; Meaning: Philosophical Thebersome. Conventions could be essential only if I ories; Radical Interpretation; Rules. needed to know, before your utterance, what you Bibliography would mean by the sentence you uttered. But, according to Davidson, it suffices for communication that Burge T 1975 On knowledge and convention. Philosophical Review I can find out afterwards, drawing on all kinds of Davidson 84:249-55Communication and convention. In: D 1984 contextual clues. I could, in fact, start from scratch, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Clarendon Press, without any assumptions about or any knowledge of Oxford the meaning of your words, and, in a process of what Davidson D 1986 A nice derangement of epitaphs. In: LePore Davidson calls 'radical interpretation,' acquire that (ed.) Truth and Interpretation. Perspectives of the Philosophy of Donald Davidson. Basil Blackwell, Oxford knowledge. There are principles governing radical interpretation, principles which rule out unacceptable Davidson D 1994 The social aspect of language. In: McGuinness, Oliveri (eds.) The Philosophy of Michael interpretations, and although these principles are norDummett. Kluwer, Dordrecht mative, in Davidson's view, they are not conventions Dummett M 1986 A nice derangement of epitaphs: Some but well-motivated methodological principles. Since comments on Davidson and Hacking. In LePore (ed.) the concept of meaning is to be explained, to the extent Truth and Interpretation. Perspectives of the Philosophy of that it can be, by appeal to the principles of radical Donald Davidson. Basil Blackwell, Oxford interpretation, the notion of convention is not needed Dummett M 1991 The Logical Basis of Metaphysics. Duckin such an explanation. It is not necessary to make any worth, London assumption about a speaker's knowledge of linguistic Dummett M 1994 Reply to Davidson. In: Mcguinness, Oliveri (eds.) The Philosophy of Michael Dummett. KJuwer, rules or conventions, only find out what he means. Dordrecht Michael Dummett (1986; 1991; 1994) has objected to Davidson's criticism of the conventionality of lan- Gilbert M 1983 Agreements, conventions and language. Synthese 54:375-407 guage. According to Dummett, the notion of a common language, a language shared by a speech Lewis D K. 1969 Convention: A Philosophical Study. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA community, is conceptually prior to that of an idiolect, Lewis D K. 1975 Languages and language. In: Gunderson i.e. the language, or ways of speaking, of the individual K (ed.) Language, Mind and Knowledge. University of speaker. One of his arguments is based on the obserMinnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN vation that speakers hold themselves responsible to Quine W V O 1976 Truth by convention. In: The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays, 2nd edn. Harvard University socially accepted ways of speaking. On Dummett's Press, Cambridge, MA view, the goal of successful communication requires adherence to the socially accepted ways, and because Quine W V O 1980 Two dogmas of empiricism. In: From a Logical Point of View, 2nd edn. Harvard University Press, of this, that responsibility is essential to the speaker's Cambridge, MA linguistic practice. Davidson acknowledges that such Schelling T C 1960 The Strategy of Conflict. Harvard Uniadherence does further successful communication, but versity Press, Cambridge, MA denies that responsibility adds anything of theoretical Shwayder D 1965 The Stratification of Behavior. Humanities interest to the adherence itself. Press, New York Dummett also argues, in a Wittgensteinian manner, Ullman-Margalit E 1977 The Emergence of Norms. Clarendon Press, Oxford that meaningful speech requires the speaker to be a

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Family Resemblance

Emotive Meaning
O. M. Meidner

'Emotive meaning' is the charge of feeling carried by a particular word in a given utterance or 'text.' It should be distinguished from feeling conveyed more directly by speech gestures and vocal behavior (which are aspects of speech rather than language). There are brief utterances having purely emotive meaning (e.g., exclamations of surprise, anger, pleasure) which nevertheless use words and thus are part of language. Far more commonly, words combine emotive meaning with cognitive or 'referential' meaning. Essentially the feeling expressed in a particular word is simple, being either a positive or a negative attitude of the speaker towards his subject matter or his addressee, and varying only in degree, as Hayakawa saw when he wrote of'purr' words and 'snarl' words (Hayakawa 1964: 44-45). Native speakers' intuitive expertise in 'expressing themselves' in dual-function words, and in responding to others' expressions, can readily be applied to making a conscious distinction between the emotive and the cognitive components of meaning in a given utterance. To do so it is necessary first to grasp what appears to be the overall import and then to focus on individual words. Usually some relevant alternative words must be brought into consideration, that might have been used instead. This can be illustrated by the joke: 'I am firm. You are obstinate! He is pig-headed!' (attributed to Bertrand Russell; see Hayakawa 1964: 95). Here the cognitive content common to all three judgments is clear, while the emotive meanings of the adjectives are so different (or the range of feeling so wide) as to produce ironic humor. The term 'emotive' owes its currency to the writings of Ogden and Richards in the 1920s. They always used the phrase 'emotive language,' not 'emotive meaning,' and distinguished two contrasting uses of language, the emotive and the referential (or 'scientific'). They tended to ridicule emotive language, and so far as they

hoped to oust it from certain kinds of texts, the growth of the social sciences since their time has largely produced that result. Nevertheless, no matter how strong the tendency of formal education to promote objective use of language, emotive meaning retains a place: e.g., in the language of public rituals as in churches and law courts; and also wherever personal opinions are acceptable, whether they directly express their feelings (as in personal relations), or record impressions and perceptions (as by a travel writer or a critic of the arts), or express judgments leading to joint action (as in 'political' activity in its widest sense). Richards (1924) believed that poetry is justifiably emotive language but that literary criticism is not. In the context of this view and of related theories of meaning current before World War II, techniques of 'close reading' were developed. Students of the humanities were taught to scan each word or phrase in a given text (literary or not) to account fully for its contribution, including emotive meaning, to its present context by reference both to elements surrounding it in the given text and also to connotations acquired from its past applications. Such 'semantic' analysis is different from 'semantics' as a division of linguistics, which marshals the meaning components of given words apart from any actual text or utterance. Semantic analysis may produce results akin to deconstruction, though resting on a different view of language and of literature. Close reading is indispensable to both, and also to the assessment of emotive meaning. Bibliography
Hayakawa S I 1964 Language in Thought and Action, 2nd edn. Allen & Unwin, London Ogden C K, Richards I A 1923 The Meaning of Meaning. Kegan Paul, London Richards I A 1924 Principles of Literary Criticism. Kegan Paul, London

Family Resemblance
C. Travis

'Family resemblance' is an expression used by Ludwig Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations (1958) during a discussion of meaning, particularly con-

cerning the ways that words and concepts apply. While it is doubtful that Wittgenstein saw himself as presenting a general theory based on the notion of

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Truth and Meaning
family resemblance or that he intended to introduce a new technical term into philosophy or linguistics, nevertheless his discussion—along with the expression 'family resemblance' itself—has generated a great deal of interest in the philosophy of language and elsewhere. 1. Family Resemblance, Definition, and Counterexamples Wittgenstein's discussion of family resemblance (1958: Sects. 65-ca. 92) begins with captivating imagery, in response to the question of whether games have something in common in virtue of which they are games:
Don't say: 'there must be something in common, or they would not be called "games"'—but look and see whether there is anything common to all.—For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don't think, but look!... And the result of this examination is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail. (Sect. 66) I can characterize these similarities in no better way than by the expression 'family resemblance'; for the various resemblances between members of a family overlap and criss-cross in just that way: build, features, color of hair, gait, temperament, etc— (Sect. 67)

philosopher nowadays is reasonably skillful at the counterexample game. ('Suppose Martians had crystalline brains and wheels. Couldn't one of them, though conscious, actually function as a tram? And then couldn't a tram intentionally run over someone? ') However, suppose one wanted to construct an adequate semantic theory of English. In dealing with the lexicon, should just any such counterexample be taken into account? If not, then it might be argued— and some have done—that Wittgenstein is in fact wrong about most of the lexicon. (Incidentally, Wittgenstein places no weight in the discussion on a distinction between, say, concepts and predicates. This is in line with his general eschewing of technical distinctions between types of items, such as sentences and propositions. Here it is worth keeping track of his use of 'Satz' and of its standard translations into English.) Moreover, there are those who hold that, while 'tin,' for example, might have turned out to be something other than it did, it could not have been anything else, which seems to make the concept 'tin' definable by necessary and sufficient conditions. 2. Rules and the Application of Concepts Perhaps, though, family resemblance concerns a deeper point. Grant that family resemblance is, at least in part, a principle about all cases of what a concept would apply to. There is still the problem of what it is for a concept to apply to something, and of what sort of case would be a case of that; indeed there is still the problem of just which phenomenon Wittgenstein has in mind. Some features of the text may point to the answer. 2.1 Rules One remarkable fact is that Wittgenstein's famous discussion of rules is entirely contained within the family resemblance discussion—insofar as it is purely concerned with problems of how a rule could, in fact, require such-and-such in a specific case. (The discussion occurs in Sects. 84-7.) One point of the discussion is: for any rule, and any occasion for applying it, there are mutually inconsistent courses of action (applications of it) such that, for each, one can conceive of it being in fact what that rule requires. The rule might be: place a marble in the left basket just in case it is blue, otherwise place it in the right basket. Now choose your marble. There is a way of conceiving (understanding) the rule in which following it means putting that marble in the left basket; and another way in which following it means placing that marble in the right basket. For each candidate way of following the rule in this particular case, there is a way of understanding the rule which is a possible understanding of that rule, on which that is what following the rule requires. For each such understanding, it is conceivable that that should be the right understanding of the rule.

Some take the imagery to exhaust the point, which they then see as tied to either or both of these theses: first, there is no feature (other than family resemblance) shared by all items to which concept X (e.g., the concept 'game') applies; second, a weakening of the first, no feature (other than family resemblance) shared by all items to which concept X applies is absent from all items to which X fails to apply. Either thesis might be taken to apply only to certain concepts, which would then be of a special type, viz. family resemblance concepts; or to apply to all concepts, in which case family resemblance is a feature essential to concepts, at least human ones. In either case, the theses are generally taken to rule out defining a concept, at least by stating 'necessary and sufficient' conditions—that is, definitions of the kind 'an item fits the concept "chair" just in case it is F,... Fn.' For, according to this view, it is always possible to find a counterexample to any purported definition of this sort, at least where family resemblance holds. It should be noted, however, that a sufficiently narrow notion of feature might rule out a definition of the above form while there were still statable necessary and sufficient conditions for the concept to apply, e.g., disjunctive ones. Wittgenstein considers and rejects this as a possible way round his point. This rules out any reading of the point on which it is specifiable which features make for relevant resemblance. If this is the idea of family resemblance, it seems questionable. In fact, many have questioned it. Any

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Family Resemblance However, Sects. 84-7 contain a very carefully structured discussion. Each paragraph with a remark tending in the above direction contains a counterbalancing remark to block any skeptical interpretation of the point. For example, in Sect. 84, 'Can't we imagine a rule determining the application of a rule, and a doubt which it removes—and so on?' is balanced by 'But that is not to say that we are in doubt because it is possible for us to imagine a doubt.' People are generally capable of perceiving what rules, or at least familiar ones, require at this or that point. That people are—and there is no reasonable doubt that that is what they are doing—is sufficient guarantee that there are facts as to what rules require; all the guarantee one should expect. Very roughly, those facts are what we perceive them to be, except where the rational course, for a specific, special reason, is to take us to be misperceiving. If facts about what rules require need to be constituted by anything, then it is by our natural reactions, plus the surroundings in which we have them—those in which the rule might require this or that. 2.2 Fitting Concepts to Objects It is remarkable that all these points are made within and in aid of the family resemblance discussion. With that in mind, return to the problem. Pick a concept and an object. For the object to fit the concept is for it to satisfy the rule: count an object as fitting that concept just in case such-and-such, where that 'suchand-such' would obtain just where an object did fit the concept. But now, independent of the question of what such a rule might be—how the dummy 'suchand-such' might be filled in—one may question what it would be for it to be a fact that thus and so was in conformity, or not, with such a rule. This question now directs attention, in seeking the core point of family resemblance, away from the form that some definition might take to a more fundamental level concerning the application of concepts in conformity with rules. 2.3 Explanations of Meaning Before attempting an answer, some more features of the text should be noted. Another point that Wittgenstein emphasizes here is that what we know about what words mean, or which concept any given one is, and (so?) what words do mean, and which properties concepts have, is actually stated, with no inexpressible residue, in those explanations of meaning that we can and do give (see Sects. 69, 71, 75). Wittgenstein concentrates on cases where we explain meanings in terms of examples. But the point is: such explanations are as good as explanations by general formulae (e.g., those providing necessary and sufficient conditions). Either style of explanation is equally, and just as fully and explicitly, an actual explanation of what the relevant words mean. Whatever shortcomings beset explanation by example also beset explanation by formula, and vice versa. Either sort of explanation might be adequate; but there is no point in saying this if one has a proof that explanations of the latter sort could not be correct, as per the initial imagery-driven reading (in Sect. 1 above). 2.4 Family Resemblance and Proper Names In Sect. 79, Wittgenstein makes a crucial application of the idea of family resemblance to the case of proper names, or individual concepts, primarily to the Biblical name 'Moses.' On one interpretation, suggested by Kripke (1980), and perhaps due to John Searle, the application consists in a 'loose-backing-ofdescriptions' theory of names. On such a theory, a name, in a particular use, is to be understood in terms of a specific, though perhaps loosely bounded, set of descriptions, or general properties. Their function is this: the name, so used, refers to that unique individual, if there is exactly one, of whom most of those descriptions are true. Wittgenstein does consider such a theory in the first sentence of the second paragraph of Sect. 79, but immediately rejects it. It occurs as one of a series of trial balloons he punctures en route to his goal. The remarkable features of Sect. 79 lie elsewhere. The simplest is that in the course of that section he applies the idea of family resemblance to concepts of all types ('The fluctuation of scientific definitions'), including cases where he obviously recognizes that one can give definitions in terms of general formulae. So the 'impossibility' of doing that cannot be the message of family resemblance. Second, the initial imagery limps badly and obviously when applied to proper names. General concepts, simply conceived, as per the initial picture, have extensions which, as a rule, contain multitudes, at least in principle. Overlapping similarities between cases may then be overlapping similarities between items in the extension. Here, we at least know where we stand. However, 'Moses' applies to, if anything, only one thing. If there are overlapping similarities, it is not clear between which items they hold. 'Moses' refocuses attention away from objects that are to fit a concept or not, towards the surroundings in which they are to do so. There are different circumstances in which one may be confronted with a person who either is or is not Moses (the bearer of that name). In such different circumstances, different things will count as required for being that referent— so says Sect. 79. (This, incidentally, provides an alternative treatment of all the phenomena that led Kripke and others to apply a notion of 'direct reference' to names.) Note that this is not the 'loose-backing-ofdescriptions' view. There is no fixed stock of descriptions, the majority of which must fit a referent. Requirements on a referent merely vary. It would be equally out of step with Sect. 79 to see a general con115

Truth and Meaning cept such as chair, game, or number, as tied to a fixed stock of features, such that 'overlapping similarities' between items in the extension consisted in overlapping subsets of that stock which the various items possessed. 2.5 Rules, Concepts, and the Importance of Surroundings With an eye on surroundings, we can return to the fundamental question. Though any rule admits of various understandings, we often see what rules require in specific cases. Another understanding would have been the right one if it were one that a reasonable person would have. But it is not. Sometimes, though, what we see is that one would say different things about what a rule requires, depending on the surroundings in which we are to say them. The variations in understanding that some being might have are sometimes variations in the understanding that we would have under varying circumstances. We pick up a marble, but it is a cat's eye: the part that is colored is blue (for the most part), but much of it is clear. Into which basket must it go according to the rule? Into the left one, if it is a blue marble. But is it? We have various ways of classifying things as blue or not, and accept different ways for different purposes. In some surroundings, placing the marble in the left basket would be correctly perceived as just what the rule requires. In others, it would not. Nor need that mean that we confront a different rule each time. The phenomenon of an object fitting a concept takes shape from the family resemblance discussion: it is a view of the object counting as doing that in given surroundings where it is to count as doing so or not. Changing the surroundings may change whether it so counts. In different surroundings, what is required for then fitting the concept may differ. Looking at the various surroundings in which an object may be judged to fit a concept, and what would be required, in each, for doing so, one may perceive in these fluctuating requirements networks of 'overlapping and criss-crossing similarities.' That point is completely orthogonal to the question of whether words can be defined by general formulae—an orthogonality that Wittgenstein emphasizes.
3. Family Resemblance and the'Essence of Language'

The family resemblance discussion begins and ends with a reference to 'the essence of language.' In Sect. 65, the point is that Wittgenstein will supply no essence; family resemblance explains why not. In Sects. 91-2, the points are at least twofold. First, though it may be useful to analyze words in one way or another for some purposes, there is no such thing as the way in which they really are to be analyzed, no unique logical form. For the lexicon, there is no purpose-independent fact as to whether a word is really to be defined via a formula or in some other way. An analysis draws a comparison between words and one picture of how to do or say things; one which may be useful, but which reveals no unsuspected essence of the words in question. Second, one might think of an essence of words, or language, as something which determines just how and where they are correctly applied, of what spoken truly; some property of the words which is what really confers on them all the facts of this sort. In that sense, words have no essence. There is certainly none contained in what they mean. (The point of the rulefollowing discussion is to show that there could not be such an essence and to show how we may live, and think, quite well without any.) What facts there are of the correct use of words come from the constantly shifting surroundings of their use. The idea of family resemblance aims to get us to the point of seeing that. See also: Concepts; Names and Descriptions; Private Language; Rules; Wittgenstein, Ludwig.
Bibliography Cavell S 1979 The Claim of Reason. Oxford University Press, Oxford Kripke S 1980 Naming and Necessity. Basil BlackweU, Oxford Travis C 1989 The Uses of Sense. Oxford University Press, Oxford Wittgenstein L 1958 Philosophical Investigations. Basil BlackweU, Oxford

Dilthey (d. 1911). The former based text interpretation on the interaction between 'grammatical understanding' (of what a sentence means) and 'psycho-

Holism logical understanding' (of what the writer means by a sentence). The latter emphasized the difference between the natural sciences and the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). Karl-Otto Apel may be mentioned as a modern representative of hermeneutics. Relying in part on work by Peter Winch, he has shown close similarities between many traditional hermeneutic themes and Wittgenstein's later philosophy. Hermeneutics is naturally opposed to 'methodological monism' (also called 'positivism'). According to this philosophical doctrine, there exists only one scientific method which applies equally well to all types of phenomena. Yet it is precisely within physics that this method has been most fully developed, with the consequence that all other sciences are supposed to imitate the example of physics in every respect. As against this standpoint, hermeneutics adduces several nonmonistic arguments. First, while the causal relation between two physical events can only be externally observed, it may be claimed that in the 'causation of human actions' the causal tie between reasons and actions is experienced directly, and that understanding actions by others is based on this kind of experience. This is the famous distinction between observation and understanding (= Verstehen, also called 're-enactment' by R. G. Collingwood). This distinction goes back to the ancient distinction between 'observer's knowledge' and 'agent's knowledge' already employed by Plato and Aristotle. Second, it is evident that the human world contains entities that are absent from the inanimate world, most notably 'norms.' And since norms, although directly known by intuition, are not reducible to the physical space and time, it follows that those sciences which analyze norms must remain qualitatively different from physics. This seems to be the case not just for grammatical theory (also called 'autonomous linguistics'), but also both for (formal) philosophy and for (philosophical) logic (see Itkonen 1978). Third, the study of the social world may give rise to a (scientific) 'critique' of this very world. Again, this dimension is necessarily absent from (the study of) the inanimate world. After stating (some of) the differences between the natural sciences and the human sciences, it is good to point out that there are similarities as well. In fact, the issue of 'similarity vs. difference' is relative to the level of abstraction: the higher the level of abstraction, the more similarities emerge between the sciences. At the highest level, all sciences (or 'academic disciplines') are similar insofar as they yield theoretical descriptions which are evaluated and ranked on the basis of (more or less) intersubjective criteria. On a more purely philosophical level, hermeneutics continues the tradition of transcendental philosophy insofar as, rather than analyzing that which is known, it tries to explicate that which makes knowledge possible in the first place. It rejects, however, the Kantian approach, which assumes the existence of some timeless and intraindividual framework. Instead, the historical and social (= interindividual) preconditions of knowledge are emphasized. As a consequence, hermeneutics is much concerned with the issue of 'relativism vs. universalism.' This also shows the connection with Husserl's notion of Lebenswelt, and with Wittgenstein's notion of'form of life.' See also: Husserl, Edmund.
Bibliography Apel K-O 1973 Transformation der Philosophic. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt Collingwood R G 1946 The Idea of History. Clarendon Press, Oxford Itkonen E 1978 Grammatical Theory and Metascience. Benjamins, Amsterdam Winch P 1958 The Idea of a Social Science. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London

Holism
A. Weir

Holism, in the philosophy of language, is an approach which emphasizes the mutual interdependence of all the items of linguistic knowledge so that, for example, understanding the meaning of a given expression is said to require understanding the meaning of the sentences of a large sector of the rest of one's language (perhaps the entire language). Often such linguistic

holism derives from a more general holism with regard to the mind and its cognitive states.
1. Arguments for Linguistic Holism

One argument in favor of linguistic holism proceeds from a nativist account of language learning in conjunction with a form of holism in the philosophy of
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Truth and Meaning science known as the Quine/Duhem thesis. The nativist account of learning one's first language sees such acquisition as a process of unconscious scientific theorizing about the interpretation of the public language of one's adult teachers, the theorizing carried out in an innate language of thought, a 'machine code' in the brain. The Quine/Duhem thesis holds that only fairly comprehensive bodies of theoretical beliefs— hypotheses plus auxiliary hypotheses, plus data about boundary conditions etc.—entail empirical consequences. Applying such holism to linguistics, one might conclude that only interpretations of large fragments of a person's language have testable consequences. Hence only such comprehensive theories can be justified; only such theories could be known to be true. The nativist then concludes that only when the language learner has unconsciously formed an interpretative theory of most or all of the public language, does he or she have knowledge of that language. A second, rather negative argument, is the antinaturalist one: intentional, outward-directed psychological states are fundamentally different from natural phenomena. In particular, humans, unlike stars or atomic particles, are rational agents, and this means explanation in the human sciences must be of a wholly different character from that in the natural: to do with empathetic understanding and interpretation rather than with capturing the phenomena in mathematical equations. According to Donald Davidson, the role of rationality in understanding agents necessitates an holistic account of mind and language (see Davidson, D.\ A third argument in favor of holism is also a negative one: the alternatives to holism are unacceptable. Often the only alternative is thought to be an atomistic approach to mind and language, as found in behaviorists such as Skinner. Holists have convincingly argued that cognitive states issue forth in behavior only as mediated by further states and this point demolishes any attempt to identify pieces of linguistic knowledge one-by-one with disconnected behavioral dispositions and, more generally, any view on language which does not take account of the interconnectedness of language understanding.
2. Counterarguments against Holism

interpreted as providing an impossibility proof of this type. However, antinaturalist holism is not the only alternative to atomism. Many views on language and mind can be described as 'molecularistic.' On this approach, the mind is an hierarchically organized system of behavioral dispositions, with an extremely rich structure—perhaps too rich to be fully comprehended by the mind itself. The more complex elements of the hierarchy are dependent on some or all of the simpler, down to a bedrock of minimally complex proto-cognitive states whose nature is much as the behaviorist supposed all mental states were. One example of a molecularist approach in the philosophy of language is Michael Dummett's according to which sentences stand in a hierarchy of complexity with grasp of all but the simplest sentences requiring grasp of others lower down in the hierarchy. For the holist, though, molecularism does not do sufficient justice to the interconnectedness of the items of our linguistic knowledge. Consider semantic fields, such as the system of color concepts. It looks as if grasp of one requires grasp of all the others, so one gets a circle of interdependences with no winding down to a common primitive base.
3. Conclusion

The first argument for holism will carry little weight with those who find implausible the idea of an innate language of thought, or of young children engaging, even 'tacitly,' in complex linguistic theorizing. More generally, it will be dismissed by those who deny that knowledge of meaning is an example of knowledge that some proposition is correct. Similarly the second argument will be unpersuasive to anyone of a naturalistic bent unless it can be shown that a natural scientific explanation of agents is blocked by their purported rationality. The third argument has been
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Success in accounting for semantic fields, then, is one crucial test area where an adjudication between the molecular and holist approach to language may be found. Another might lie in compatibility with generally accepted scientific approaches to mind. Molecularism, for instance, fits well with an informationprocessing approach to mind, whereas holism does not: e.g., if there is a circle of interdependencies in semantic fields then it looks as if the program which models our understanding of the elements of the field will loop, and so never issue in output to other parts of the system. Failure to connect with a natural science approach is not, of course, a vice for militant antinaturalists. Even Davidson, however, feels the need to introduce rigorous theory into the interpretation of language via Tarski's method for defining truth for certain formal languages, a definition which incorporates an explanation of the truth conditions of complex sentences in terms of simpler. The Davidsonians seek to generalize this method to natural language and use it to generate, for each sentence of the language under study, a specification of a state of affairs which we then interpret as the content of utterances of the sentence by the language users. This forms part of an overall attempt to make rational sense of their behavior and the linguistic interpretation is successful insofar as the overall attempt is (if the latter is not, one has, in accordance with the Quine/Duhem thesis, a choice of where to pin the blame). The suspicion arises, however, that this rigorous Tarskian theory is an idle cog in the holist interpretive exercise. Any old method

Indeterminacy of Translation
for assigning sentences of the interpreter's language to those of the subject language will do, it seems, as a means of generating linguistic interpretations to be tested as part of the overall psychology. One might ask more of the truth theory—that it be 'internalized' by the subject language speakers, for instance. This, however, is a problematic notion; Gareth Evans attempted to make sense of it in terms of correspondence between dependencies of understanding— what sentences would one lose understanding of if one forgot the meaning of s etc.—and derivability relations in different candidate truth theories. But the danger for the holist is that such an approach might presuppose molecularism. The fate of holism, then, is likely to hinge on how well it can be integrated with successful programs in cognitive psychology. Bibliography
Davidson D 1980 Mental events. In: Essays on Actions and Events. Clarendon Press, Oxford Davidson D 1984 Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Clarendon Press, Oxford Dummett M A E 1976 What is a theory of meaning? (II) In: Evans G, McDowell J (eds.) Truth and Meaning. Clarendon Press, Oxford Evans G 1985 Semantic theory and tacit knowledge. In: Collected Papers. Clarendon Press, Oxford Fodor J, Lepore E 1992 Holism: A Shopper's Guide. Blackwell, Oxford

Indeterminacy of Translation
C. J. Hookway

The indeterminacy of translation was defended by W. V. O. Quine in his Word and Object (1960). Suppose one is translating another language into English. Quine holds that alternative translations could be constructed differing in their translations of individual sentences but all fitting the speech dispositions of native speakers of the language. There is no fact of the matter which is correct; indeed, all are. One may be more useful than another, perhaps allowing one to interpret the aliens as agreeing with one's own view of the world. But this does not mean that the preferred translation manual is true or correct. 1. Quine's Argument According to Quine:
Two translators might develop independent manuals of translation, both of them compatible with all speech behavior, and yet one manual would offer translations that the other translator would reject. My position was that either manual could be useful, but as to which was right and which wrong there was no fact of the matter. (1979: 167)

If correct, the thesis undermines the objectivity of talk of meaning and synonymy. Quine's argument for his thesis focuses on the nature of 'radical' translation: the attempt to understand a wholly alien language unaided by knowledge of related tongues and without the help of bilinguals, etc. This makes the evidential basis for translation as clear as possible. Both in learning language and in translation, he urges, 'we depend strictly on overt behavior

in observable situations' (Quine 1990: 38). Since he is concerned with 'cognitive' meaning, his view of which 'speech dispositions' are relevant is quite restricted: we attend to the circumstances in which speakers assent to different sentences. 'Observation sentences' are reliably correlated with distinctive sorts of sensory stimuli: these provide a bridgehead for translation; one seeks to translate them by sentences assented to in the same sensory conditions. But other occasion sentences, whose application depends upon supplementary information about the context, and all standing sentences cannot be correlated with sensory stimuli. Once a speaker accepts a standing sentence, his disposition to assent to it is not correlated to distinctive current sensory stimulation. The indeterminacy of translation then rests on the possibility that translation manuals may offer contrasting translations of standing sentences and some occasion sentences while agreeing in their predictions about the empirical circumstances in which observation sentences will be accepted. Quine defends a form of holism: one makes experiential predictions on the basis of one's beliefs only with the aid of a mass of background theory and assumptions, so there are no precise entailments between particular standing sentences and observation sentences. This introduces a 'looseness of fit' between 'theory' and observation which makes room for indeterminacy. A form of indeterminacy is defended even for observation sentences: the indeterminacy of reference. Suppose that an alien sentence is uttered only in the

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Truth and Meaning presence of rabbits or rabbit traces. Translations of this sentence as 'A rabbit is nearby,' 'Rabbithood is instantiated locally,' 'There is an undetached part of a rabbit nearby,' and so on, would all fit the evidence. Quine therefore suggests that alternative translation manuals may differ in their translation of words occurring in observation sentences while still fitting all the appropriate evidence. undetached rabbit parts: this is Quine's doctrine of ontological relativity.
3. Responses to Quine's Thesis

2. The Importance of the Indeterminacy of Translation

Quine's thesis would show that there is no objective notion of synonymy: words and sentences are 'synonymous' only relative to a translation manual. This challenges the intelligibility of a number of concepts depending upon meaning or synonymy: the distinction between analytic sentences (those which are true by virtue of meaning) and synthetic sentences would be untenable; no sense would attach to analyzing the meaning of words or concepts; the notion of a proposition, something expressed by any of a class of synonymous sentences, would have to be abandoned. So the thesis threatens ideas which are central to traditional ideas of philosophical analysis. Our ordinary conception of mind regards people as possessing 'prepositional attitudes,' states like belief having a content given by a 'that-clause': for example, the belief that snow is white; the hope that it will not rain at the weekend, and so on. Any indeterminacy in the meanings of one's utterances will infect one's propositional attitudes. Thus a further consequence of Quine's thesis is lack of an objective basis for propositional attitude psychology: there is no fact of the matter concerning what one believes, other than relative to a manual of translation or interpretation. Finally the indeterminacy of reference introduces indeterminacy into our ontological commitments: according to the translation manual one adopts, someone may be speaking of rabbits, of rabbithood, or of

Although Quine has not displayed in detail how alternative translations could fit all his 'evidence,' few have doubted the possibility. Critics have generally noted how restricted is the evidence which Quine allows the translator and argued that one can also observe when aliens find utterances inappropriate, or when they find the denial of a claim absurd rather than merely eccentric. Moreover an adequate translation attributes to the aliens an intelligible set of beliefs and desires as well as standards of plausibility and methods of inquiry which one can understand. And there may be restrictions on the kinds of grammar which must be read into a language. Such suggestions may merely lessen the degree of indeterminacy without refuting the doctrine. Quine may respond that while such criteria influence which translation one uses, they are irrelevant to the question of 'correctness.' But many philosophers would reject the naturalistic empiricism grounding his position. See also: Holism; Occasion Sentences and Eternal Sentences; Ontological Commitment; Radical Interpretation.
Bibliography Davidson D 1984 Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Clarendon Press, Oxford Quine W V O 1960 Word and Object. Technology Press of the MIT, Cambridge, MA Quine W V O 1979 Facts of the matter. In: Shahan R W, Swoyer C (eds.) Essays on the Philosophy of W. V. Quine. Harvester, Hassocks Quine W V O 1990 Pursuit of Truth. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Rorty R 1972 Indeterminacy of translation and of truth. Synthese 23: 443-62

Indian Theories of Meaning
F. Staal

Unlike some Western theories, Indian theories of meaning, though often logical or philosophical in character, are based upon a sound empirical foundation because their proponents were familiar with the techniques and results of the Indian grammatical
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tradition. It may be noted, furthermore, that Sanskrit terms for 'meaning' are, in general, used only of words, sentences, and other elements of language. There are no Sanskrit expressions corresponding to English 'the meaning of existence' or 'the meaning of

Indian Theories of Meaning ancillary sciences in that it neither restricted itself to a particular school nor provided separate grammars for each of the schools (like the Pratisakhyas did for phonology). It pertained to all the schools. Linguistics 1. Early Efforts attained full independence from the Vedas when Theories of meaning arise only after centuries of effort Panini shifted attention to the ordinary, daily speech at interpretation, and to this generalization India is of his contemporaries. Among the early grammarians, no exception. The earliest Indian efforts are found in Patanjali (150BC) is most explicit, when he states that a class of prose works, the Brahmanas, which from ordinary speech is the empirical material or means of the beginning of the first millenium BC were attached knowledge upon which the study of grammar is based: to each of the Vedic schools and which interpreted A man who wants to use a pot, goes to the house of a not so much difficult phrases in the Vedic corpus as illpotter and says: 'Make a pot, I want to use it.' But a man understood points of ritual described there. A typical who wants to use words does not go to the house of a Brahmana passage explains why a particular rite is grammarian and say 'make words, I want to use them.' performed and why a particular Vedic phrase or manWhen he wants to express a meaning he uses the approtra is recited at that time. When elucidating the manpriate words. tras themselves, paraphrases are given and identities (Mahabhasya 1.1.1) between entities are postulated, as in the following Grammar includes the study of regional usage, e.g., example in which the phrases from the Veda that are interpreted are given within single quotes, and in 'Southerners are fond of taddhita suffixes,' and deals which reference is made to the deities Prajapati, Savitr, with special cases such as shouting from afar or the idiom of gamblers. and Agni: The grammar of Panini (ca. 500 BC) seems, at first He offers with 'Harnessing the mind,'—Prajapati, sight, to refer to the meanings of words only hapassuredly, is he that harnesses, he harnessed the mind for hazardly. Accordingly, it has long been held that that holy work; and because he harnessed the mind for Panini dealt almost exclusively with phonology and that holy work, therefore he is the harnessing one. 'Savitr stretching out the thoughts,'—for Savitr is the morphology and neglected not only syntax but also mind, and the thoughts are the vital airs;—'gazing rev- semantics. This view, however, cannot be maintained. erently at Agni's light,' that is, having seen Agni's light;— Panini's grammar deals with both the meaning of 'bore up from the earth'; for upwards from the earth he words and the meaning of sentences. The latter analyindeed bears this (offering). sis is naturally based on his treatment of syntax, which (Satapatha Brahmana 6.3.1.12-13; transl. J. Eggeling.) is not only insightful but also extensive. The extent Like modern hermeneutics, to which it is by nature to which his syntactical theories capture the entire related, the Brahmanas abound in interpretations that domain of Sanskrit syntax remains a subject of discussion. are empty, obvious, or arbitrary. An effort at more systematic etymological interpretations of a portion of the vocabulary of the Rgveda 2.1 Word Meaning was given in the Nirukta, Yaska's commentary on the Panini's grammar refers to the meaning of words in Nighantu which consisted of lists of Vedic words, often two distinct cases: (a) In the grammar itself if meanings determine arranged in groups that cover a semantic field. In the form, as in: khatva ksepe (2.1.26), 'khatva "bed" first section of the Nighantu there are, for example, 23 is compounded in the Accusative in a Tatpuwords for 'night.' There are also sections dealing with rusa compound when an insult is implied.' ambiguous words, that is, words that have two or Example: khatvarudha 'lying on the bed' which more distinct meanings; in such cases, the Nirukta means: 'rude, of bad behaviour.' provides different etymologies, often fanciful, for each (b) In a list of about 2,000 verbal roots, the Dhatof these meanings. There are also general discussions upatha, in which the verbs are classified in on the parts of speech and their general meanings, accordance with the 10 classes of verbs disfor example: 'verbs express "becoming" and nouns, tinguished by Panini in his grammar. Some "being".' The Nirukta seems to belong to approxischolars have doubted that the earliest Dhatmately the fifth century BC, the same period as the upatha known was composed by Panini, but, grammar of Panini (most scholars have treated the whatever is the case, there is little doubt that a Nirukta as preceding Panini because of the undoubted Dhatupatha with a similar structure and priority of the Vedic to the grammatical tradition; methodology, adapted to the structure of the according to Paul Thieme, however, Panini is earlier grammar, was used by him. Following the than the Nirukta). eleventh-century grammarian Kayata, others 2. The Grammatical Tradition have argued that the meaning entries were added later, but there is no reason to accept The grammatical tradition started as an ancillary scithis view (Bronkhorst 1981). ence to the Vedas, but it was different from the other life,' expressions that have caused much trouble in the West not only in popular speculation but also in philosophy.

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Truth and Meaning In the Dhatupatha, each verbal root is indicated by a metalinguistic marker and followed by its meaning, expressed by a noun in the locative case, that is, in the form 'root X in the meaning of Y.' The roots with their markers are treated like nouns: for example, a root with suffix -/' is declined like a noun ending in -/, and sandhi rules apply to its combination with the following word. Some of the meanings are given in terms of nouns derived from the same verbal root so that the information is circular and uninformative. When there are several meanings, these are distinguished and different metalinguistic elements are used to distinguish the roots from each other. The following are examples from the fourth and seventh classes: which subsequently, because of a sandhi rule, turns into:
aksair dlvyati 'he plays with dice.'

But the semantic interpretation of this sentence also contains the information that dice stand to the action of playing in the object relation which is expressed by the object (karman) karaka, realized on the surface level by the suffix -On yielding:
aksan dlvyati 'he plays dice'

Panini distinguishes seven karaka relations characterized in semantic terms as follows: (a) apadana 'the fixed point from which something recedes'(1.4.24); (b) sampradana 'indirect object' (1.4.32); iv, 68 yuja samQdhau 'the root yuj- in the meaning of (c) karana 'the most effective means' (1.4.42); concentration' (d) adhikarana 'locus' (1.4.45); vii, 7 yujir yoge 'the root yuj- in the meaning of (e) karman 'what is primary desired by the subject' conjunction.' (1.4.49); Like Panini's grammar itself, the Dhatupatha is part (f) kartr 'what is independent' (1.4.54); of the Indian scholarly tradition and its traditional (g) hetu 'what prompts the kartr' (1.4.55). curriculum that characterizes the Indian paideia of a This system accounts for the meaning of sentences classical education. Throughout the centuries, San- and complex meaning relationships between sentences skrit authors have referred to it whenever meanings by using mechanisms such as illustrated in the diceare discussed. For example, the main commentary playing example, that is, by systems of rules that operon the YogasHtra, the Yogastitrabhasya attributed to ate between the different levels and that are carefully Veda Vyasa of the seventh or eighth century AD, says ordered and related to each other. The resulting deriin commenting on the first sutra: vations account for equivalencies like those between Doubt as to the actual thing (yoga) is occasioned by the Active and the Passive. Other illustrations are doubt as to the meaning of the word. This doubt is discussed in Kiparsky and Staal (1969) including the removed by stating that in the language of the sQtra, yoga causative relations that make use of the hetu karaka, is etymologically derived from the root yuja in the sense which accounts for meaning relationships between of concentration and not from the root yuji in the sense sentences such as The elephant-driver mounts the eleof conjunction. [This comment shows, incidentally, that phant and The elephant allows itself to be mounted by most contemporary interpretations of yoga in terms of the elephant-driver, or The pupil learns grammar from 'union' are mistaken.] the teacher and The teacher teaches grammar to the pupil. Such meaning relationships, then, are treated 2.2 Sentence Meaning the grammar and Sentence meanings are derived with the help of the byThe karaka systemnot relegated to a dictionary. also accounts for the the karaka theory. KSraka relations, like 'deep structures,' ings of nominal compounds and various othermeannomoccupy a level between semantic interpretations and inal forms that are related to simple sentences, for surface structures. This level of linguistic analysis was maker of pots, pot-maker in intentionally added; it does not depend on historical example, to: he makes pots, pots are made= potter,etc. addition by him, accident and has little to do with 'mismatch' or In the realm of theoretical semantics, Panini made 'tension,' terms used by Deshpande (1991) in an other- an important distinction wise interesting hypothesis about its ritual back- between 'use' discovery (Brough 1951): the Sanskrit, a and 'mention.' In ordinary grounds. There is need for such a level because there 'mentioned' or 'quoted' expression is by the is no one-to-one correspondence between the levels, particle iti which follows it, that is,indicated a corEnglish as illustrated by the following example (see Kiparsky responds to Sanskrit a-iti. Since grammar deals in the and Staal 1969:85). The sentence aksair dlvyati (he cases with the form of expressions and plays (with) dice) has as part of its semantic interpret- majority ofmeaning or use, the grammar wouldnot with their be ation the information that the dice stand to the action riddled with such iti's. Grammarians have accordingly of playing in the instrument relation which is expressed by the instrument (karana) karaka, realized restricted ordinary usage, and expressions without iti their form. on the surface level by the suffix -bhis which becomes refer tounderlying distinction between language and The -aw yielding: metalanguage is explicit in Panini, the latter being referred to as upadesa (literally, 'teaching'). Met*aksais dlvyati
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Indian Theories of Meaning alinguistic elements like the suffix -/ attached to verbal roots are called anubandha ('marker'). They do not belong to the language that is the object of the description, i.e., Sanskrit. For example, the Sanskrit root referred to is yuj, not yuji or yuja. In the finally derived surface forms, the anubandha marker has to be removed. Patanjali explains how this is similar to ordinary usage—a crow that sits on the roof of a house, for example, may be utilized to identify the house: '"Which of these two is Devadatta's house?" "That where the crow sits." When the crow flies away and the house is no longer marked, one knows in consequence which house was indicated' (Mahabhasya, ed. Kielhorn 84.21-85.3). Similarly, English grammar has to account formally for the fact that the past tense of 'drive' is 'drove,' not 'drive + ed' or 'drive +past suffix -ed.' The sutras or rules of grammatical description belong to the metalanguage of grammar. But there is a higher, meta-metalevel to which the metarules (paribhasa) of grammatical description belong. The most famous of these is a rule that safeguards the consistency of at least part of the grammar by eliminating contradictions: vipratisedhe param karyam 'in case of contradiction, the latter (rule) prevails (over the former)'(1.4.2). In order for this rule to apply, the rules were listed in a specific order. The discovery of rule order is therefore closely related to that of metalanguage. The use made of metarule 1.4.2 proves, incidentally, that the Sanskrit grammarians recognized and utilized the principle of noncontradiction. This principle was formulated and adhered to at the same time or earlier in the ritual manuals, and subsequently in Indian logic and in most of the philosophical systems.
3. Philosophical Theories of Meaning

The following three sections include only a sample of Indian theories of meaning, excluding much that is of later date and all the Jaina and Buddhist contributions. 3.1 Mimamsa Theories The Mimamsa (short for Pflrva- or Karma-Mlmamsa) is a system of ritual philosophy that provides a particular interpretation of the Vedas. It is similar to the Brahmanas in this respect, but it has incorporated the methodology of the ritual and grammatical sutras and is therefore more principled and systematic. According to the Mimamsa, the core of the Veda consists of 'injunctions' (vidhf). The logical and semantical analysis of these is of special interest from a comparative point of view because it complements the prevailing paradigm of sentence interpretation in Western logic and philosophy, which have long looked upon sentences as if they were primarily statements. The excessive preoccupation of the Mlmamsa with the optative

corresponds to the Western obsession with the indicative. The stock example of vidhi is the injunction expressed by yajeta 'he shall sacrifice.' According to the grammatical analysis which the Mlmamsa accepts, this expression consists of the verbal root, yaji (where / is the indicatory element) and the optative ending eta. According to the Mlmamsa philosophers, the principal semantic feature of this composite expression is not the root but the ending, because it is through the ending that a word is brought in relation to other words. The ending in turn expresses two elements: 'general verbality' (akhyatatvd) and 'optativeness' (lintva). Of these two, the latter is again the marked feature, for every verb denotes an action but only the optative force is prompted by the Vedic injunctions. This optative force is 'the ultimate of ultimates, the peg on which the whole system of Vedic duty hangs' (Edgerton 1928: 176). The grammarians had already characterized the sentence in terms of its final verb. The Prabhakara Guru school of Mlmamsa extended the analysis of Vedic injunctions in a similar spirit to the more general semantic theory ofanvitabhidhana, according to which the meaning (abhidhand) of a sentence is a single entity that depends on the combined meanings of its constituent elements (anvita). The other Mlmamsa school, that of Kumarila Bhatta, was satisfied with the apparently simpler and more commonsensical theory, that the meaning of a sentence arises from abhihitanvaya, a stringing together or collection (anvayd) of the meanings of its constituent elements (abhihitd). The former theory is closely related not only to the analysis of Vedic injunctions but also to a logical or syntactic analysis in which sentences (not necessarily statements) are the main units of discourse. The latter theory is more easily related to a dictionary-oriented semantics. The theory that sentence meaning depends on word meaning is especially unsatisfactory when trying to account for logical connectives such as negation and other syncategoremata. This problem is not solved by introducing dictionary entries such as 'Neg,' for 'notA is not a function of not and A, but a recursively defined expression.' Thus, He did not do it is analyzed as 'it is not the case that he did it.' This goes back, in historical terms, to the Aristotelian insight that 'the negation of the sentence is the negation of the predicate,' which is reflected in turn by the logical symbolism F(a), formed so that the negation of F(a) is ~F(a), or, more explicitly (as in the Principia Mathematicd): That the meaning of not-A is not a function of the meanings of not and A was obvious to the followers of the anvitabhidhana theory. But they went further and constructed a theory of negation which is richer
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Truth and Meaning than most Western theories because it includes injunctions. This theory may be expressed with the help of symbols that directly translate the basic MTmamsa concepts. Let sentences be expressed as functions with two functors, A (Skhyatatva, 'verbality') and L (lintva, 'optativeness'), for example:
L(A(k)), 'the knot (k) should be (L) tied (A).'

Now, if one expresses negation again by ~, there are two possible negations:
~L(A(k)), 'the knot should not be tied'
and:

L~(A(k)), 'the knot should be untied.'

r's (repha)') does not mean 'two r's' but 'bee.' (The reason is that another word for 'bee,' bhramara, has two r's.) The MTmamsa analysis went further by distinguishing four classes of words: (a) rQdha, 'conventional,' e.g., dvirepha (b) yaugika, 'derivative,' e.g., pacaka 'cook' from pac- 'to cook' (c) yogaradha, 'both derivative and conventional'; e.g., pankaja 'anything that grows in mud' (panka), but also more specifically 'lotus' (which does grow in the mud) (d) yaugikarQdha, 'either derivative or conventional,' e.g., asvagandha which can mean either 'smelling like a horse' (asva) or refer to a particular plant (which does not smell like a horse).

The MTmamsa took another step and introduced the negation of terms, which the above formalism in fact 3.2 Bhartrhari suggests, but which is not used in Western logic (where the equivalent is expressed in the theory of classes by Bhartrhari, a fifth-century philosopher from Kashmir, northwest India, influenced by Vedantic and Buddhist means of complementation): ideas, erected in his Vakyapadlya a metaphysical L(A(~x)), 'the not-knot should be tied.' superstructure on the traditional semantics with which This is interpreted as: 'another knot should be tied.' he was intimately familiar (he wrote a subcommentary These types of negation were arrived at because of the on Patanjali's commentary on Panini). In this metaexistence of traditional injunctions such as ananu- physics, the principle of the universe is a 'language yajesu yeyajamaham kuryat ('at the not-after-rites he principle' (sabdatattva; sometimes translated as should say "Ye-Yajamahe"') which is not interpreted 'speech essence'), unchanging and without beginning as: 'at the after-rites he should not say "Ye-Yaja- or end. It introduces time, that is, past, present, and mahe"' but as: 'at rites other than the after-rites he future, into the world of names and forms (namarupa)^ The principle of the universe may be grasped by a should say "Ye-Yajamahe".' The correctness of the anvitabhidhana theory was timeless, unitary flash of experience which Bhartrhari also argued from learning theory. A child who hears called pratibhS (intuition). But the meaning of a senhis father use the sentences gamanaya and asvamanaya tence is also grasped by pratibhS; in fact, it ispratibha. first understands the meanings of the entire expression This doctrine reacts to the theory of sentence perfrom the context or situation: in the first instance, he ception of Nyaya logicians and others, according to sees someone go and return with a cow; in the second, which the process of understanding follows the hearwith a horse. The child concludes that the two sen- ing of the sentence that is being uttered in time, from tences mean: 'bring a cow' and 'bring a horse,' respec- beginning to end; when the last word is perceived, the tively. Then, by analysis of identity and difference meaning is finally grasped. Bhartrhari's doctrine adds or a substitution procedure, he arrives at the word innate order and syntax to one's understanding and meanings and concludes that gam means 'cow,' asvam thereby changes the philosophic perspective: instead 'horse,' and anaya 'bring.' Only later will he discover of a barren empiricism he offers an insight into the that endings such as -m are suffixes which express the deep structure of language. According to Mark Sideritis (1985:137), this theory relation of the words to each other. This process of analysis, called anvayavyatireka, was mentioned, 'would have us believe that the notion of word meanprobably for the first time, by Katyayana in a vartikka ing is the product of a misleading analysis of linguistic (Mah&bhasya 1.2.2) and was widely used by the gram- phenomena,' which is counterintuitive and conflicts with the work of lexicographers. This is almost true. marians. The MTmamsa made several other contributions to According to both Bhartrhari and the MTmamsa anvithe theory of meaning. The Wittgensteinian slogan tabhidhana theory, word meaning is arrived at by that the meaning of a word lies in its use was not only abstraction and anvayavyatireka, that is, by comknown much earlier in the West by Latin school- paring forms that are partly identical and partly masters as verba valent usu, but also in India by the different—for example gamanaya (bring-the-cow) and followers of the MTmamsa and other theorists who asvamanaya (bring-the-horse); see above—but it is not accepted the principle that radhi, the conventional therefore 'misleading.' From a historical point of view, meaning, established by usage, is stronger than yoga, these sentence-centered theories reflect the develthe meaning arrived at by etymological derivation. opment of the Indian tradition of language analysis Thus for example, dvirepha (etymologically 'two (avi) which started with the cutting up of the continuous
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Indian Theories of Meaning
flow of sounds of the Vedic Samhita into the wordfor-word representation of the Padapatha. Bhartrhari's view that the relation between words and meanings is based upon samaya (convention), has caused confusion (as have Saussure's and Carnap's quite dissimilar contentions), but it has recently been shown that Bhartrhari's term denotes 'established usage' where 'established' implies a tradition of elders (Houben 1992). The question as to whether the first establishment was arbitrary does not arise, since Sanskrit is held to be eternal. Most publications on the Vakyapadiya confine themselves either to philology or to the metaphysics of its early parts. The semantico-philosophical speculations, especially of the third part, still await a thorough investigation from a linguistic point of view. 3.3 Later Doctrines From the insights of the MTmamsa and the gradually improving logical analysis of the Nyaya, semantic theories of great richness and depth developed and were adapted by most of the later philosophical schools. They were also put into practice by the literary critics of Indian poetics and aesthetics (Alamkarasastrd). The latter tradition had been inspired by one of the classics of Sanskrit literature, Bharata's Natyasastra (seventh century AD?), which dealt primarily with dramaturgy, dance, and music. This tradition was developed especially in Kashmir, the home not only of Bhartrhari but also of Kashmir Saivism and Tantrism. A good idea of the insights and subtleties of the resulting scholarship can be obtained by immersing oneself in the recent translation of Anandavardhana's Dhvanyaloka ('Light on (the Doctrine of) Suggestion'), with its commentary Locana ('the Eye') by the critic, philosopher, and Saiva mystic Abhinavagupta (Ingalls, et al. 1989). This article can do no more than list the elements of such treatises and the traditions they represent. Indian theorists were familiar with many problems of word meaning, but the idea of sentence meaning occupied the central place in Indian semantics. The early grammarians had evolved the doctrine that a sentence is 'what possesses a finite verb,' a step beyond the naive idea that it was simply 'a collection of words.' The MTmamsa developed the theory of akanksa or 'mutual (syntactic) expectancy' as an additional criterion required for full sentencehood. They argued that a sentence is neither a collection of words such as cow horse man elephant, nor one that possesses a finite verb such as cow irrigates man elephant. He irrigates with water, however, is a sentence because there is a mutual syntactic connection, akanksa, between all its constituent words. Such an akQnksa also exists between the words of he irrigates it with fire, and yet this is not a sentence. One says that such a sentence is 'syntactically' but not 'semantically' well formed. According to the Indian theorists, another criterion must be fulfilled: a sentence must possess yogyata (semantic compatibility). This is present in he irrigates it with water and absent from he irrigates it with fire, and also from such expressions as:
There goes the barren woman's son with a chaplet of skyflowers on his head. He has bathed himself in the waters of a mirage and is holding a bow of rabbit's horn. (Bhattacharya 1962:141)

As a further condition, asatti or samnidhi (contiguity) is required; it eliminates the case of words that are separated by other words or uttered at long intervals (we would regard this requirement as pertaining to performance, not competence). The final requirement is tatparya (speaker's intention), a controversial and much debated concept that reminds us of some of the work of Paul Grice. There are Buddhist parallels (for example abhiprayika; see Ruegg 1985, 1988). The underlying idea of tatparya is that the denotative power of words is fixed, but when constructing and uttering a sentence, the intended meaning that is conveyed may depend on the 'speaker's intention' (vaktrabhipraya). The intended meaning need not be individual; it can be part of the culture. This is reflected by a similar concept, vyanjana (suggestion), that was developed by the literary critics of the AlamkSra school. When a poet refers to ganga (the river Ganges), this carries the suggestion of coolness and purity. Not necessarily, however, for that suggestion is absent in the bare statement 'there are many fish in the Ganges' (quoted by Ingalls, et al. 1989:579). The metaphorical use of language was invoked in philosophical contexts, for example, by the followers of the Advaita Vedanta. In 'great statements' such as the Upanisadic tat tvam asi, traditionally (but erroneously: see Breloer 1986) interpreted as 'thou art that,' the reference to the Absolute is not through the primary meaning of the word, but through its secondary meaning (laksana). Secondary meaning may exclude primary meaning (jahallaksana), include it (ojahallaksana), or both include and exclude it (jahalajahallaksana). An example has already been cited of the first: dvirepha ('with two r's') which denotes 'bee,' but bees do not possess r's. An example of the second is kuntahpravisanti, literally, 'the lances enter,' which refers to the men who carry lances but also to the lances themselves. An example of the third is the tvam ('thou') of the Upanisadic statement tat tvam asi: this does not refer to the person in the dialogue, namely, Svetaketu son of Uddalaka, but denotes his universal self, stripped of all individual attributes such as limited intelligence. According to the later logicians, when a sentence, thus characterized as a string of words with akanksa, yogyata, and asatti, is uttered, it generates in the hearer a cognition of its meaning (sabdabodhd). This

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Truth and Meaning cognition is a single entity, but since it may be complex, it is analyzed in terms of recursively applied expressions of the form X which is qualified by Y,' that is 'X which is qualified by (Y which is qualified by Z...),' etc. This analysis in terms of nominal expressions conflicts with the grammarians' analysis that presents a sentence as a verbal form with nominal (and other) adjuncts. The meaning cognition of Hari sees a bird, for example, is analyzed by the logicians as: 'the operation generating the activity of seeing which has a bird as object is qualified by Hari as its doer.' Such an analysis is not merely 'artificial'; it is an expression of an artificial language which is well formed in accordance with the principles of its construction. Attempts at formalization have accordingly been made, by Matilal and others (see Matilal 1968; 1988; Staal 1988:249-55).
Bibliography Even confined to publications in English, the literature on Indian theories of meaning is extensive. The present article is based on various sources referred to, along with many others, in Staal (1988). The most useful general introduction remains Kunjunni Raja (1963). Bhattacharya B 1962 A Study in Language and Meaning: A Critical Examination of Some Aspects of Indian Semantics. University of Calcutta, Calcutta Brereton J P 1986 'Tat Tvam Asi' in Context. Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenlandischen Gesellschaft 136:98-109 Bronkhorst J 1981 Meaning entries in Panini's Dhatupatha. Journal of Indian Philosophy 9:335-57 Brough J 1951 Theories of general linguistics in the Sanskrit grammarians. TPhS 27-46 Cardona G 1975 Paraphrase and sentence analysis: Some Indian views. Journal of Indian Philosophy 3:259-81 Deshpande M M 1991 Prototypes in Paninian syntax. JAOS 111:465-80 Houben J E M 1992 Bhartrhari's Somoya/Helaraja's Samketa. Journal of Indian Philosophy 20:219-42 Ingalls D H H, Masson J M, Patwardhan M V (trans.) 1989 The Dhvanyaloka of Anandavardhana with the Locana of Abhinavagupta. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Kiparsky P, Staal F 1969 Syntactic and semantic relations in Panini. Foundations of Language 5:83-117 Kunjunni Raja K. 1963 Indian Theories of Meaning. The Adyar Library and Research Centre, Adyar, Madras Matilal B K 1968 The Navyanyaya Doctrine of Negation. The Semantics and Ontology of Negative Statements in Navyanyaya Philosophy. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Matilal B K 1988 Sabdabodha and the problem of knowledge-representation in Sanskrit. Journal of Indian Philosophy 16:107-22 Ruegg D S 1985 Purport, implicature and presupposition: Sanskrit abhipraya and Tibetan dgons paj dgons gfi as hermeneutical concepts. Journal of Indian Philosophy 13:309-25 Ruegg D S 1988 An Indian source for the Tibetan hermeneutical term dgons gii 'intentional ground.' Journal of Indian Philosophy 16:1-4 Sideritis M 1985 Word meaning, sentence meaning and apoha. Journal of Indian Philosophy 13:133-51 Staal F 1988 Universal: Studies in Indian Logic and Linguistics. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL Tabler J A 1989 The theory of the sentence in PQrva MlmamsQ and Western philosophy. Journal of Indian Philosophy 17:407-30 Tarkatirtha Pandit V 1992 The Nyaya on the meaning of some words. Journal of Indian Philosophy 20:41-88 Tola F, Dragonetti C 1990 Some remarks on Bhartrhari's concept ofpratibha. Journal of Indian Philosophy 18:95112

Language Game
M. W. Howe

'If I had to say what is the main mistake made by philosophers of the present generation...,' remarked Wittgenstein, 'I would say that it is when language is looked at, what is looked at is a form of words and not the use made of the form of words' (1966: 2). The idea of a language game, which is central to Wittgenstein's later conception of philosophy, is expressly designed to combat this mistake. The core notion of a language game, which can be found throughout his later work, consists of examples of simple language use, together with enough background information about the speakers and context to render the purposes
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of the utterances intelligible. The context can either be natural or invented, and the overall aim is to shed philosophical light on the concepts and issues involved.

1. What a Language Game Is

Although the phrase 'language game' is used in the Philosophical Grammar (PG), the concept makes its first mature appearance in The Blue Book (Bl.B) dictated to pupils in 1933-34:

Language Game
I shall in the future again and again draw your attention to what I shall call language games. These are ways of using signs simpler than those in which we use the signs of our highly complicated everyday language. Language games are the forms of language with which a child begins to make use of words. The study of language games is the study of primitive forms of language or primitive languages. If we want to study the problems of truth and falsehood, or of the agreement and disagreement of propositions with reality, of the nature of assertion, assumption, and question, we shall with great advantage look at primitive forms of language in which these forms of thinking appear without the confusing background of highly complicated processes of thought. When we look at such simple forms of language the mental mist which seems to enshroud our ordinary use of language disappears. We see activities, reactions, which are clear-cut and transparent. On the other hand we recognize in these simple processes forms of language not separated by a break from our more complicated ones. We see that we can build up the complicated forms from the primitive ones by gradually adding new forms. (Bl.B: 17)

from one language to another; asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying. This is a deliberately chaotic list, explicitly designed to elude capture by any single classificatory scheme. It is clear, however, that 'language game' no longer simply refers to the kind of simple, artificially constructed examples found in Br.B (although there are plenty of those in PI as well), or to 'the forms of language with which a child begins to make use of words' mentioned in Bl.B; 'language game' in PI can frequently mean any isolated aspect of the whole practical, social, and intellectual background against which language is used.
2. The Purposes of the Game Analogy A central purpose is to break the hold of a very tempting philosophical theory. This says that people give their words meaning by privately matching them with objects—either physical objects or properties, Platonic objects or mental concepts—and that the way these words are actually employed in sentences and speech acts is something secondary, derivative, and inessential. The analogy is intended to show that the speaking of a language is something people do, part of a communal, social, activity. Words only have meaning through being used in sentences, and sentences only have a meaning through being used in speech-acts. Speech-acts themselves are only to be understood through understanding the needs, values, and social practices of the society that uses them—a complex which Wittgenstein calls a 'form of life' (PI: § 23). What might be called the contingently private uses of language—thinking to oneself, making entries in a diary—are parasitic on language's more public forms:
How should we counter someone who told us that with him understanding was an inner process?—How should we counter him if he said that with him knowing how to play chess was an inner process?—We should say that when we want to know if he can play chess we aren't interested in anything that goes on inside him.—And if he replies that this is in fact just what we are interested in, that is, we are interested in whether he can play chess— then we shall have to draw his attention to the criteria which would demonstrate his capacity, and on the other hand to the criteria for the 'inner states.' (PI: 181)

Oddly, the notion is not mentioned again in The Blue Book, and he does not illustrate it with a single explicitly signalled example. However, in The Brown Book (Br.B) of 1934-35 virtually every page provides a case. Here are two:
Imagine this language:- ... Its function is the communication between a builder A and his man B. B has to reach A building stones. There are cubes, bricks, slabs, beams, columns. The language consists of the words 'cube,' 'brick,' 'slab,' 'column.' A calls out one of these words, upon which B brings a stone of a certain shape. Let us imagine a society in which this is the only system °flangUage(Br.B: 77)

The men of a tribe are subjected to a kind of medical examination before going into war. The examiner puts the men through a set of standardized tests. He lets them lift certain weights, swing their arms, skip, etc. The examiner then gives his verdict in the form 'So-and-so can throw a spear' or 'can throw a boomerang' or 'is fit to pursue the enemy,' etc. There are no special expressions in the language of this tribe for the activities performed in the tests; but these are referred to only as the tests for certain activities in warfare. (Br.B: 102)

By the time the reader reaches Wittgenstein's late masterpiece, Philosophical Investigations (PI), published posthumously in 1953, the notion of a language game has broadened significantly. At § 23 he gives his most extensive list of examples: giving and obeying orders; describing the appearance of an object or giving its measurements; constructing an object from a description (a drawing); reporting an event; speculating about an event; forming and testing a hypothesis; presenting the results of an experiment in tables and diagrams; making up a story and reading it; play acting; singing catches; guessing riddles; making a joke, telling a joke; solving a problem in practical arithmetic; translating

A major advantage of a philosophy of language that gives use (PI: 43) priority over denotation or meaning is that it helps end the tyranny of declarative sentences and propositions. There is more temptation to think that declarative sentences have their meaning conferred by private acts of ostensive definition than orders, questions, and requests which seem intrinsically more other-directed. There are very few declarative sentences which would naturally prompt a specific, expected reaction, but the repertoire of natural responses to orders etc. is invariably both more limited and closer to the occasion of prompting.

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Truth and Meaning Nondeclarative uses of sentences are therefore more important for children learning their first language and also anthropologists learning the languages of alien societies. It is no accident that the languagegame that begins both PI and the Br.B is concerned with builders telling assistants what materials must be fetched. In addition, the game analogy helps end the obsession of philosophers with nouns and substantives (man, sugar, today (Br.B: 77)) and encourages attention to be focused for once on all the other parts of speech (but, not, perhaps (Br.B: 77)) which, for obvious reasons, the denotative or matching model tends to overlook. Wittgenstein's earliest interest (June 1930) in the games analogy came from noting that the rules of a game offered a way of understanding how ink marks or sounds could acquire significance without linking them to occult entities:
The truth in [mathematical] formalism is that every syntax can be regarded as a system of rules for a game— I was asked in Cambridge whether I think that mathematics concerns ink marks on paper. I reply: in just the same sense in which chess concerns wooden figures. Chess, I mean, does not consist in my pushing wooden figures around a board. If I say 'Now I will make myself a queen with very frightening eyes; she will drive everyone off the board' you will laugh. It does not matter what a pawn looks like. What is much rather the case is that the totality of rules determines the logical place of a pawn. A pawn is a variable, like 'x' in logic (quoted in Waismann 1967: 104)

that any game can be said to be wholly rule-governed: 'I said that the application of a word is not everywhere bounded by rules. But what does a game look like that is everywhere bounded by rules? whose rules never let a doubt creep in, but stop up all the cracks where it might?—Can't we imagine a rule determining the application of a rule, and a doubt which it removes— and so on?' (PI: §84). Eventually, in §§ 143-242, the whole notion of rule-following is placed under intense scrutiny. Basically, Wittgenstein's argument is that no occurrent mental event or disposition (including grasp of a formula) can explain why an individual follows a rule correctly. Correctness is determined by whether an individual follows a rule in the same way as all the other members of his society, and this depends on nothing more (but nothing less) than a shared sense of value, importance, similarity, and appropriateness. So-called logical necessity is a special case of psychological necessity. In PI it is less the rule-governedness of certain games than the sheer multiplicity of games as a whole that makes them such a compelling analogy for linguistic practices. At Sect. 65 of PI he considers an objection to his views:
'You take the easy way out! You talk about all sorts of language-games, but have nowhere said what the essence of a language-game, and hence of language, is: what is common to all these activities, and what makes them into language or parts of language.'

He replies:
Consider for example the proceedings that we call 'games.' I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all?—Don't say: 'There must be something common, or they would not be called "games"'—but look and see whether there is anything common to all.—For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. (PI: §66)

For a time Wittgenstein continued to think of language as a rule-governed calculus, or series of calculi, but he soon grew disenchanted with the notion. The Italian economist Piero Sraffa is usually credited with breaking the hold this idea had on him. Wittgenstein was explaining that a proposition must have the same logical form as what it describes. Sraffa listened, made the Neapolitan gesture of brushing his chin with his fingertips, and then asked, 'What is the logical form of that?' In the following passage from PG (1933-34) he can not only be seen moving away from the more formal, logical area of language but simultaneously realizing the limitations of the chess analogy:
I said that the meaning of a word is the role which it plays in the calculus of language. (I compared it to a piece in chess.)... But let us think also of the meaning of the word 'oh!' If we were asked about it, we would probably say, 'oh!' is a sigh; we say, for instance, 'Oh, it is raining again already' and similar things. In that way we would have described the use of the word. But now what corresponds to the calculus, to the complicated game which we play with other words? In the use of the words 'oh' or 'hurrah' or 'hm' there is nothing comparable. (PG: 67)

By the time he came to write PI he had grown profoundly skeptical about the explanatory power of rules. In one of the earlier sections he begins to doubt
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'Language game' is not a technical term with a strict definition, but a phrase intended to prompt the reader into seeing an analogy. This is important because there are aspects of games which are clearly not present in linguistic practices, and which are not, for the most part, of interest to Wittgenstein. Games are, in a sense, insulated from real life, whereas Wittgenstein would be the first to insist that language is very much part of it; most games—like rugby and cricket—do not develop and do not interact with one another, yet Wittgenstein clearly thought that language games do overlap, develop, and interact; finally, 'game' suggests something frivolous, a pastime, whereas most language-use is perfectly serious (although Wittgenstein does say at one point that even the amusingness of children's language games may be relevant to the concept he develops (Br.B: 81)). To keep the analogy in perspective it must be considered alongside two

Literary Structuralism and Semiotics others, namely, tools (PI: § 11) and money (PI: § 120). The analogy between language and tools captures the idea of seriousness, variety, and engagement with everyday practical life, but it loses the social and conventional element in language; the analogy with money captures the idea of serious engagement with practical life and conventionality, but loses the aspect of variety.
3. Language Games and Philosophical Method

An understanding of language games is vital for understanding Wittgenstein's later conception of philosophy and philosophical method. Language games are 'the primary thing' (PI: §656): it is only in the context of such games that language has meaning, significance, and point. Philosophical problems arise because philosophers have a false picture of how certain complex words (e.g., knowledge, being, object (PI: § 116)) function. This invariably arises either because the use of a word in one language game is confused with its use in another (e.g., the use of measurement in the language game of temporal measurement is confused with its use in the language game of spatial measurement (Bl.B: 26-7)), or because a term is considered 'outside language-games,' in abstraction from the context in which it has its life or meaning (PI: § 47). In the latter case Wittgenstein says that language is 'idling ' (PI: § 132), and has gone 'on holiday' (PI: § 38). This leads to perplexity, muddle, and confusion, and, in extreme cases, to the erection of grandiose and often paradoxical metaphysical theories which seem profound, but which are really no more than the magnified products of linguistic error. Traditional philosophy, on Wittgenstein's conception, is an 'illness' (PI: § 255) which can only be cured by the quiet weighing of linguistic facts. He regarded his central task as one of bringing 'words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use' (PI: § 116). His method consists in 'assembling reminders' (PI: § 127) as to how words are actually used. This involves describing and noting the language games in which they have a role. Although new language games can develop and old ones disappear, they are not the kinds

of things which can ultimately be explained or justified. If asked to justify the use of a certain word in a certain context, the only reply may be: This languagegame is played' (PI: § 654). Philosophy no longer puts forward theses, or attempts to explain: it clears up linguistic confusions (PI: § 128). For example, there is the traditional problem of other minds: I can know that / think, have pains, feel emotions but I can never know if this is true of others; the most I can know in these cases is that they exhibit (for example) pain-behavior. It is quite possible, therefore, that I always have been and always will be surrounded by automata. Wittgenstein thinks this chilling, metaphysical vision arises through misunderstanding, having a false picture of the language game we play with 'know' and 'believe' when used in conjunction with psychological words:
I can know what someone else is thinking, not what I am thinking. It is correct to say 'I know what you are thinking,' and wrong to say 'I know what I am thinking.' (A whole cloud of philosophy condensed into a drop of grammar.) (PI: §222)

Literary structuralism and semiotics has been and is a complex and constantly changing phenomenon. Its various forms and practices in the twentieth century

constitute the most explicit poetics that Western literary, linguistic, and critical theories have been able to offer. It is however difficult to provide a neat devel129

Truth and Meaning opmental outline. The practices involved have been chronologically disrupted and disruptive. The major figures have migrated from school to school, country to country, crossing political and ideological boundaries. As a consequence, theories developed in one political context become transformed and recontextualized in another where they function as different technologies for understanding the literary. There are many disjunctive traditions involved, deriving from different cultural sources and influences. These spring up in different places and apparently in isolation from each other. They are chronologically overlapping and separate rather than neatly sequential, and they frequently arrive at similar conclusions from different perspectives. The plurality which characterizes the history of twentieth-century literary structuralism and semiotics now constitutes its present. The state of the art at the end of that century is its own disjunctive history. This article attempts to produce an archaeology, in Foucault's sense (see Foucault 1972), rather than a history, to map the terrain, to identify the major continuities and discontinuities, and to argue for some rereadings of the taken-for-granted arguments about what literary structuralism and semiotics are supposed to be. The first section provides a kind of history, arriving at some general statements about the current state of the art. The second gives a brief overview and set of preliminary definitions. It also attempts to signpost some major theoretical shifts in position. The third looks at matters of theory and methodology, and provides an archaeology of the terminology which derives from structuralism and semiotics and is still used in poststructuralism, deconstruction, and feminism.
1. The Complex Evolution of the Field

The twentieth-century field of literary studies has become accustomed to a narrative chronology which locates structuralism as prior to, and later developed by, a semiotics which is in turn superceded by a number of new movements all generally characterized as being 'post-' both structuralism and semiotics. This chronology (Culler 1975) ignores many of the complexities of early formalist work in Russia in the 1920s, and of the Prague School in the 1920s and 1930s, each of which was properly both structuralist and semiotic, but historically preceded what is usually identified as 'structuralist' and located in New York in the 1940s and then in Paris from 1950 to 1970 (O'Toole and Shukman 1975-83). This order of events is further complicated by the ubiquitous presence of Roman Jakobson (1971,1981) in all these places and movements, by the movement of Claude Levi-Strauss (1963) from Czechoslovakia to the United States in 1941, and then to Paris in 1950; and by the effects of the uncertain authorship and
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delayed translation of the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin, Voloshinov, and Medvedev (Voloshinov 1973; Bakhtin 1981, 1984, 1986), whose work in Russia in the 1920s and later, known to the Prague School in the 1930s and 1940s, did not have its effect on Paris structuralism and semiotics until it was taken up by Tzvetan Todorov (1984) and Julia Kristeva (1980) in the late 1960s. In Russia, the inheritance of the formalists (Matejka and Pomorska 1971; Steiner 1984), of Prague School semiotics (Mukafovsky 1977; Matejka and Titunik 1976), and of Bakhtin himself (who continued working in Russia until he died in 1975) has been the Tartu school of semiotics, illustrated in the work of its leader, Yuri Lotman (1977). In Paris a very influential group led by A. J. Greimas developed into a Paris School semiotics (Greimas 1987; Perron and Collins 1989) which in many ways has stood outside the more poststructuralist and postmodern aspects of French literary theory, and derives from different traditions from the Baithes-Kristeva kinds of semiotics. Both traditions are the products of early formalism, but Barthes and Kristeva take from such work as Jakobson's (1960: 18-51) on the poetic function, Tynjanov's (see Matejka and Pomorska 1971) on literary evolution, Bakhtin's on genre, dialogue, and dialogism, while the Greimas group have been much more strongly influenced by works like Eichenbaum, The Theory of the Formal Method (see Matejka and Pomorska 1971), Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (1958), and by Levi-Strauss's (1963) crucial work on myth. Greimassian semiotics has been primarily a narrative and cognitive semiotics (Greimas 1987). It has preserved the scientificity of an earlier formalism in ways which run counter to contemporary tendencies to critique such scientism (Grosz and de Lepervanche 1988). At the same time it has explored areas that are central to quite different kinds of semiotics and poststructuralism: the production of meaning, the recognition that the apparent presence of meaning in a text is always an illusion, that 'Meaning, in the sense of the forming of meaning, can thus be defined as the possibility of the transformation of meaning' (Jameson, in Greimas 1987:10). Central to it has been Greimas's rewriting of Propp as the famous semiotic square (Greimas 1987), a powerful heuristic and mediating device which can 'reduce' a narrative to a series of 'cognitive' or ideological positions, or can rewrite a cognitive/scientific or literary text into a narrative process in which contradictory terms attempt a synthesis. Later (Perron and Collins 1989) the work also became much more self-reflexive. In all of these areas, it is impossible to characterize it as structuralist or semiotic without recognizing the links it has with many aspects of poststructuralism as well. The writings of Bakhtin and Voloshinov were translated (Kristeva 1969) and took effect in Paris in the

Literary Structuralism and Semiotics late 1960s, and this coincided with the point at which Paris structuralism moved in the direction of poststructuralism, a body of theory which still belongs within the ambit of what is here being called literary structuralism and semiotics. Bakhtin's ideas were particularly 'readable' in a context where many of the basic tenets of earlier structuralist and semiotic paradigms were being questioned and rethought. The seminal texts of this new poststructuralist moment would include: those of Bakhtin himself; Roland Barthes, Elements ofSemiology (1967b); S/Z (1974); Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (1984); Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (1976); Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (1974), The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), and The History of Sexuality (1984). The standard chronology of these events belies the similarities between what was done in the name of formalism, semiotics, and structuralism and what counts as 'post-' both structuralism and semiotics— such literary/linguistic or poetics enterprises as are characterized by the names poststructuralism, deconstruction, and feminism. The above account of the provenance of literary structuralism and semiotics ignores a number of important schools and traditions which have contributed to the analysis and understanding of structuralist poetics and semiotics of the literary. Four should be mentioned. All are related to the traditions discussed above, and to the work of Jakobson and Eco which are treated below. /./ The United States and Canada The traditions of North American semiotics associated with Thomas Sebeok and Paul Bouissac came to semiotics from quite different directions, although they share a background in the history that runs from formalism to Paris structuralism and beyond. The differences have been in the influence of C. S. Peirce (1986) and A. J. Greimas. Sebeok's (1979) work, and semiotics in the US in general, have been strongly influenced by a Peircean pragmatism which does not mesh easily with the European and French traditions. The work is characterized by the contributions to the journal Semiotica. This school has not been primarily interested in literary structuralism and semiotics, and is therefore not treated in depth here. In Canada, the Greimas school, and links with other French theory and poststructuralism as well as feminism, British Marxist stylistics and cultural studies, and linguistic pragmatics and discourse analysis, have produced a semiotics which differs from both its US and European counterparts, and which has found the scientific pretensions of the US version problematic (Bouissac 1981). The work is illustrated by the predominantly text-based, literary theoretical, and semiotic orientations of the publications in the journal of the Toronto Semiotic Association, RSSI: Recherches SemiotiquesI Semiotic Inquiry. 1.2 Roman Jakobson Jakobson provided the impetus for a different development in stylistics in 1958, when, at the conference whose proceedings were later published as Style in Language (Sebeok 1979), he presented the 'concluding statement' paper. This paper contained his arguments about the poetic function of language, arguments which revitalized many aspects of his and others' earlier work (in Russia and Prague in the 1920s and 1930s) on literary language and the poetics of literature. This work was functionalist, structuralist-semiotic, and essentially Marxist in its orientations. It was Marxist in the sense that, despite the debates in Russia in the 1920s about the excesses of 'vulgar' sociological Marxism in literary studies, it involved literary analysis which related literary texts to the social and cultural conditions of their production, and to the material bases of the societies which produced them. In Jakobson's 1958 paper, the relation of the functions of language to a contextualized theory of the communication situation, the concern with the relations of the word to the world, and the location of a poetics which deals with verbal structure within the realm of general semiotics, are all issues that are implicitly materialist and sociological. Jakobson was influenced by Husserl's phenomenology as well as by Saussure's focus on the system that was language, and was interested in the first instance in what it was that constituted 'literariness.' He was interested in literature only insofar as it constituted another kind of evolving and changing system, like language (Steiner 1984). In a paper first published in Czech in 1933-34 and in English in 1976, Jakobson responded to criticisms of formalism that it 'fails to grasp the relationship of art to real life,' that it calls for an 'art for art's sake approach,' that 'it is following in the footsteps of Kantian aesthetics' (1981:749). His response is worth quoting in full here:
Neither Tynjanov nor Mukar/lovsky nor Sklovskij nor I—none of us has ever proclaimed the self-sufficiency of art. What we have been trying to show is that art is an integral part of the social structure, a component that interacts with all the others and is itself mutable since both the domain of art and its relationship to the other constituents of the social structure are in constant dialectical flux. What we stand for is not the separatism of art but the autonomy of the aesthetic function. (Jakobson 1981:749-50)

Jakobson's literary work was very different in its implications from the largely unpoliticized and decontextualized work of Chomsky, and from the generative linguistics which was his other main area of influence and interest in the US at the time of the 1958 paper on the poetic function of language. However, his work on the literariness of the literary was coop ted in unpredictable ways, in this new historical context, in both America and Britain, by a very different aesthetic that derived from new criticism and other text-based
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Truth and Meaning approaches to the literary (e.g., Richards 1929). This thing that might properly be called 'social semiotics.' was specifically middle-class and individualistic. It Its difference was in its preparedness to deal with found the emphasis on form in Jakobson's poetics French theory, and in the important new directions compatible with its own tendency to treat the aesthetic that made possible. The book is Roger Fowler's text in isolation from questions of social or historical Literature as Social Discourse: The Practice of Linguiscontext. tic Criticism (1981). Its most important contribution The 1958 conference also connected with different is its bringing together of the British work outlined developments in North American semiotics, and above with that of Roland Barthes, Bakhtin, and marked a period of high enthusiasm for a new kind others from the European traditions. This made possof interdisciplinarity in the humanities which drew on ible an explicitly theorized move from an intrinsic linguistics, literary theory, psychology, and cultural structuralist linguistic criticism which focused on the production or writing of the text, and on its formal anthropology. linguistic properties, to a literary and textual semiotics 1.3 British Stylistics which foregrounded the role of the socially and In the 1960s, transformational linguistics began to linguistically constructed reading subject, and allowed have an influence in Britain. But it was the theories of an account of that reader's ability to decode (in Barthe British linguist Michael Halliday (1978, 1985), thes' sense of code as used in S/Z, or Eco's 1977 use theories that are functionalist, systemic, Marxist, and of the term) the patterns such an intrinsic criticism semiotic in orientation and belong to the Neo-Firthian might discover. The decoding was theorized as a form tradition in linguistics and anthropology, which of intertextuality: the reader was making sense of this became the dominant linguistic force in British Styl- text in terms of codes that were familiar from other istics. Halliday's was a fundamentally structuralist texts. approach to the linguistic analysis of literary texts This marked the beginnings of many attempts under (Halliday 1980). This approach was, however, the heading of 'social semiotics' to bring French and mediated by versions of Halliday's theory of language poststructuralist theoretical positions into contact as social semiotic. This is a constructivist theory which with the British stylistics and Hallidayan traditions sees language as constructing the social, rather than (see, for example, Birch and O'Toole 1988). simply representing a social order that pre-exists There was also a new interest in British stylistics in language. It is associated with a theory of the semiotics the 1970s, in the larger structures of texts, and in of context which theorizes the ways in which texts the networks of relations within which they circulate. are both realizations of their producing contexts and Theories of discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and constructive of the speaking subjects and the social pragmatics were used to relate the form of a text to realities that constitute those contexts. In this intel- its patterns of use, and to the social contexts in which lectual environment, Jakobson's and other formalist it operates. Much of this work has recourse to Haland Prague school analyses of the literary were appro- lidayan linguistics, and to register and genre theory as priate and compatible influences, and were not subject adumbrated within that tradition and others. Ronald to the recontextualizations that affected them else- Carter's (1982) and Roger Fowler's (1986) work is where. British stylistics has always been underpinned typical. The continued vitality of this work in the by a specific concern with the semiotics of text-context 1990s was marked by the appearance of two new relations, as well as with the structural analysis of journals: Language and Literature, which appeared in texts themselves. Britain in 1992, and Social Semiotics, first published British stylistics and linguistic criticism reached its in Australia in 1991. most influential point at the end of the 1970s, with the publication of Kress and Hodge, Language as 7.5 Umber to Eco and Italian Semiotics Ideology (1979), Fowler, et al. Language and Control (1979), Aers, et al. Literature, Language and Society All the traditions discussed so far derive linguistically in England 1580-1680 (1981). All three books used from Saussure in Geneva at the beginning of this both transformational and systemic linguistics, and century. Nearly all were further influenced by the an overtly structuralist and Marxist theoretical Prague Linguistic Circle, particularly Jakobson and approach to the analysis of literary texts. All three Trubetskoy. The Danish linguist Hjelmslev (1961) surwere also more concerned with locating literature in a faced as an important influence at about the same wider social context, and in its relations to other texts, time in the semiotics of Roland Barthes (1974) and to institutions and power, than had ever been the case Eco (1977). There are many other kinds of linguistics in early or even later structuralist work on the literary which have served as models or metaphors for the literary text, or as actual methods of doing the analywithin this context (Hasan 1985). sis. 1.4 Social Semiotics in Britain and Australia In his Theory of Semiotics (1977), Eco brings all of One book stands out as signaling new directions in these and the work of C. S. Peirce into a coherent British stylistics, and marking its transition to some- relationship. His rewriting of Saussurean linguistics in

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Literary Structuralism and Semiotics Hjelmslevian and Peircean terms is significant. He accomplished a bringing together of structuralist methodology with semiotic and poststructuralist insights into the relations of texts to other texts. Eco provided, in his use of Hjelmslev, Jakobson, and Peirce, a detailed semiotically based account of the pragmatics and practical textual functioning of the constant 'deferral,' to use a Derridean deconstructive term, which is meaning. Using Hjelmslev's (1961) concept of'connotative semiotic' and Peirce's articulation of the 'interpretant' (1986), Eco (1981a: 261 ff.) developed the theory of 'infinite semiosis' and of the 'open' text in ways which used and supplemented Jakobson's structuralist/semiotic understandings of the nature of the literary text. Eco brings together many traditions to focus on writing, reading, and textuality. His theory is profoundly linguistic and philosophical, and yet transcends both in its concern with general semiotics. It has much wider implications than the literary, but offers crucial insights into the structures and semiotics of literary texts. In A Theory of Semiotics (1977) Eco challenges the directions of Julia Kristeva's semiotics. She was the only other semiotician, in the 1970s, to be working as broadly as Eco himself, but her work had taken on psychoanalysis by this time (1984) and she had begun to insist on the semiotics of subjectivity, and on the subjectivity of the reading/writing subject as the means by which intertextuality interacts with the structures of texts. Eco's theory of codes remains in the arena of the social and the linguistic and he refuses both Kristeva's psychoanalytical move and the focus on subjectivity. 1.6 Semiotics in the 1990s Semiotics has come to deal with the ways in which meanings are made in social systems and within cultures, and with the complex ways in which this social making of meanings in turn constructs the social and the cultural. Semiosis is seen, as predicted by Saussure, to operate not only through language and in forms mediated by language (e.g., literature and myth, history, science, and practices of educational transmission), but in and through other media (e.g., the built environment, architecture, art, fashion, music, gesture, film, the body). To study semiotics in the 1990s is to learn to read and write the world as text. Historically, both structuralism and semiotics came to be identified with a primary concern with language and the literary, with what it was that constituted the literary as opposed to other kinds of verbal texts, with issues of reading the literary. This was always an important issue, but only one of many areas of inquiry that occupied the Russian formalists, and the Prague School semioticians. In Russia in the 1920s, there was already a trenchant critique of the dominant literary establishment. The aim to provide a 'scientific' account of literature, within a Marxist framework, was intended to empower the proletariat and subvert the literary institution. That literary structuralism and semiotics became almost solely identified with the description and analysis of the aesthetic in later accounts has to do with the contexts into which the early work was received when it was translated and popularized by Jakobson and Levi-Strauss in the US in the 1940s. Their work was appropriated by the humanist traditions of literary study in the universities, traditions which fostered the notion of a purely aesthetic realm where the literary, literary texts, and authors of great works are self-evident, given objects that do not become implicated in the 'other' realms of politics, economics, and ideology. On the other hand, literary structuralism and semiotics were frequently rejected outright by these same institutions, identified as linguistic and 'scientific,' and seen as inherently antagonistic toward the privileged realm of the private, the subjective, and the creative, which was the aesthetic. The language/literature debates of the post-World War I years in Cambridge, for example, saw the separation within English of traditions of language study derived from Germanic philology from a new focus on literary response brought about by close, but nonsystematic, and certainly nonlinguistic, reading. What became linguistic stylistics and literary structuralism in the 1950s and 1960s could often only be located in the language sections of English departments, and thus became institutionally isolated from the literary which was their primary concern. These processes were repeated in the 1960s and 1970s with the second wave of influence of these ideas (see Sect. 1.3 above). These debates and anomalies have continued in English studies in British universities. They are now complicated by further controversies about the role of theory, particularly poststructuralist theory, and the relation of literary studies to more broadly based cultural studies (derived from semiotics) which would look at cultural artefacts and processes of all kinds, including the literary, as texts (film, the visual, popular culture forms like television and media, performance, and theatre). It has in fact been the very ecumenical nature of semiotics that has slowly changed and rewritten both of these entrenched literary positions. As literary structuralism and semiotics have evolved alongside poststructuralist theory, it has come to be recognized that literary texts do not operate in isolation from social processes, the socializing practices, the disciplines, or the institutional relations of power which affect all textual production, and within which subjects and their practices are constituted. Literary texts, like all other texts, are forms of social discourse, in which meanings, often conflicting and contradictory meanings, are negotiated in an ongoing and productive dialogue with changing contexts and with
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Truth and Meaning other institutionally produced forms of social discourse (the law, economics, medicine, etc.). The next sections of this article trace the essential terms of structuralist and semiotic metalanguages, as these were derived from linguistics, and suggest that later poststructuralism is still very much indebted to these metalanguages.
2. Structuralism, Stylistics, and the Linguistic Metaphor

Twentieth-century linguistics has had a number of different kinds of influence on literary studies. Structuralism has primarily been concerned with the structures of literary artefacts, specifically with the systematic nature of those structures. This systematicity is seen to be what constructs them as literary, rather than as some other kind of text. At one level then literary structuralism uses linguistics, specifically Saussurean linguistics, as a metaphor or model for thinking about the structures of literary texts as autonomous systems. The literary system which is a poem, for example, functions like the synchronic linguistic system which Saussure described for language. Structuralism has been concerned with understanding the 'grammars' or 'codes' which provide the resources, and the rules for the putting together of those resources, that enable the users of such grammars or codes to produce cultural phenomena such as myths, narratives, music, ritual, visual art, architecture, and literary texts. In many kinds of structuralism, the use of linguistics remains largely metaphorical; nevertheless, a detailed structuralist analysis of a literary text also draws on the analyst's knowledge of the grammar of the language, and thus always involves some grammatical or linguistic theory which functions as a metalanguage for identifying and categorizing the linguistic patterns in the text. If one is going to identify patterns of verbs and nouns in a text, or patterns of stress and intonation, one first needs a grammar which identifies, and thus enables one to label, those categories. There is a distinction to be drawn here between structuralism and stylistics or linguistic criticism. Stylistics or critical linguistics takes some linguistic theory, and uses its categories to analyze a literary text as a piece of, an instance of, language. There need not be any presupposition that the text being analyzed functions like a language. That presupposition is, however, a usual aspect of the use of the linguistic metaphor in structuralism. A stylistician or critical linguist may be interested in the use of nominalizations in Hemingway's prose, or in the systematic patterns of ungrammatically in E. E. Cummings's verse. He will tend to make sense of these in relation to the linguistic theory he is working with, using it as a metalanguage to decode the text, and
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accepting the meanings it attributes to the categories he is identifying. A transformationalist will read nominalizations as transformations of simpler deep structures. A Hallidayan systemic linguist will read them as grammatical metaphors, requiring 'unpacking' to reveal the ideologies their compact grammatical form conceals. Where the linguistic theories concerned are discourse analysis, sociolinguistics or pragmatics, or a functional theory of language as social semiotic like Halliday's (1978), the analysis also involves another level, which roughly parallels, but is very different to, the level of language as metaphor in structuralism. In general, all these theories relate the patterns of language produced by linguistic analysis to the social contexts of the text's use. Consistent patterns of agentless passives may thus be identified as marking the text's provenance as a scientific text. In a literary analysis from a feminist perspective, the fact that the female participant is never the subject of active verbs, or that what is attributed to her adjectivally is consistently attributed by a male who is always the subject of the verbs of knowing, may be read as indicating the text's provenance within a patriarchal order. At stake here is the ability of the analyst first to identify, in terms of some linguistic metalanguage, and then to 'decode' in terms of the same metalanguage, the patterns of language identified in the text. The decoding is a form of interpretation which depends on a theory of context and of text-context relationships, and which involves identifying parts or all of this text as being like other texts in the culture. Such analysis is frequently associated with analytical categories like register, genre, and ideology, or discourse, so that the patterns of language that constitute a text are identified as being those that characterize a particular register or genre, or that are characteristic of a particular set of beliefs or ideas (ideology or discourse of patriarchy, of science, of the child etc.). Much of this work also takes the next step and moves one level higher, to locate the registers, genres, ideologies, and discourses within institutional structures and in relation to power and issues like race, age, and gender. That is, such 'stylistic' work has become a 'critical linguistics' or 'social semiotics,' appropriating the rudiments of social and political theory in order to make sense of linguistic structures and the way they function in literary and other texts. In this respect it agrees with earlier forms of literary formalism or structuralism/semiotics, and has parallels with later versions of literary semiotics and poststructuralism. The point of difference between the older and newer theoretical positions is the initial use of the Saussurean linguistic system as a metaphor for understanding the literary, and use of any linguistic theory as a metalanguage to establish, in an apparently objective manner, the patterns and the meanings that constitute

Literary Structuralism and Semiotics a text. The Saussurean system used as metaphor is inadequate to deal with all the complex contextual matters outlined above. What Saussure excluded from the linguistic system as parole (i.e., all the social and contextual factors to do with language use) was precisely what critical linguistics, social semiotics, and poststructuralism have later wanted to deal with. Most forms of linguistics, even those that concern themselves explicitly with questions of context, maintain a version of the Saussurean system as the basis for their analysis of texts. They have maintained a belief in the concept of linguistic value as Saussure formulated it, arguing that linguistic elements have an intrinsic value or meaning that derives from their relationships of similarity and opposition to other elements within the linguistic system (see Sect. 3.1 below). They believe that the linguistic system they construct as linguists provides an objective metalanguage for establishing the intrinsic value or meaning of linguistic elements in texts. But for poststructuralism and many kinds of semiotics, all metalanguages, languages about language, theories of language, including the linguistic, are themselves texts. Poststructuralists therefore argue that grammars or linguistic systems, like other texts, are always an interpretation from someone's perspective. As such they cannot be any more objective than contextual criticism, which in its most recent forms includes the subjectivity of the interpreter as an essential part of understanding the analytic and interpretive process. On these grounds, they refuse the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic value or meaning, and even go so far as to argue that there is no meaning in texts, only meaning that results from the interaction between texts and the speaking subjects (subjectivities) who read and write them, and in so doing provide the links with contexts that quite literally 'make meanings.' Poststructuralists therefore relocate value or meaning in the social processes in which texts are made, and deny the reality of the abstract linguistic system, which they see as a theoretical fiction. 2.1 Reading as Rewriting In critical linguistic and poststructuralist readings, the reader maps from the language of the text being analyzed to other interpreting codes or texts (metalanguages). There is no qualitative difference between the linguistic and the other practices. The linguistic theory is just another code. The authority it carries however means that its effects in interpretive contexts cannot be discounted. That was one of the things Barthes (1974) was saying in S/Z in his rereading of Hjelmslev and his refusal of the then normal modes of linguistic analysis. His approach was to take chunks of Balzac's text, explore his own techniques of making sense of them, and then categorize his responses as involving five specific codes, or theories of the world; 'grammars,' that gave him the resources to 'make meanings' with this text, to make sense of bits of it by relating them to bits of other codes/texts with which he was familiar. In S/Z all 'decoding' became not only connotative, but inherently subjective in that it was always mediated by the subjectivity, the socially constructed and positioned subjectivity, of the reader. So 'analysis' became a productive reading process, in which reading involved rewriting. The recognition that reading is a rewriting, and that linguistic readings are also rewritings, went along with the deconstruction of the opposition between denotation and connotation, and the theorizing of the openness of texts to new interactions with their environments. It was one of the first performances of what it was to rewrite a story and tell it differently as a form of literary and cultural criticism. As such, it has important links with research that was going on elsewhere on the essential narrativity of all texts (the Greimas school in Paris: Greimas 1987); on the binary structures that characterize and structure all narratives (Propp 1958; Levi-Strauss 1963); on the relationships between narrative, poetry, and myth (Jakobson and Levi-Strauss 1962), on the constitutive nature of metaphor and metonymy in all types of discourse (Jakobson 1971); on the fact that not only the text-types (genres) that constitute a culture, but also its larger discursive formations and institutions, are constituted of narrativity and binarisms (Foucault 1972; Derrida 1976; Kristeva 1984, 1980). These connections linked the denial of the possibility of denotative meaning in Barthes (1974) to what eventually appeared to be a quintessential^ poststructuralist discovery of the narrativity, metaphoricity, and fictionality of all texts. The work of Jean-Fran9ois Lyotard (1984) is exemplary here. Its consequences for literary work were the interesting extension of theories and models developed for the analysis of the literary into the analysis of the social sciences generally, on the assumption that all texts are stories, written from some position, and for some specific purpose; that they are therefore in a very real sense fictions, and can be expected to be analyzable like other fictions such as myths or literature. So the theories and practices of a modernist literary institution—literary structuralism and semiotics—were appropriated by the practices and theories of poststructuralism. Poststructuralists have not, by and large, 'used' linguistics as a tool of analysis. Reoriented by the work of Hjelmslev, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, and Kristeva, who can be located respectively within structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, semiotics, and feminism, they read and rewrite, they perform their texts, remaking meanings in and through the doing of language. Poststructuralist practice has reconstructed the reader as empowered to rewrite the primary text from the intertextual
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resources of her own subjectivity and experience. The text itself, its linguistic and semiotic stuff, is not irrelevant to this enterprise. It is however theorized differently. It becomes the trace of a writing which can be remade, rewritten as the processes of semiosis begin again with the interaction of the language traces of this text with those of the embodied, sexed, speaking subject/text who is its reader. Reading and writing cease to be qualitatively different processes. There is also an important difference, effected through the work of Michel Foucault, in the position of the intellectual/cultural critic. The author has lost her institutional authority. The intellectual/critic can no longer be an objective observer. She is now in the middle of her own textual productions. There is no outside of ideology, and therefore only a practice, a doing, and never a mode of analysis, is actually possible. That is the textual politics of poststructuralist critique: to subvert and remake, from some position other than the dominant one, the hegemonic and socially ratified versions of the world which are the culture and the social narrativized. The whole enterprise is, if not profoundly linguistic, at least profoundly semiotic; nor are its politics so different from those of a critical linguistics or a social semiotics. 3. Archaeology of a Metalanguage: Continuities and Discontinuities This section focuses on particular texts and writers in order to trace the patterns of continuity and discontinuity that characterize the apparent 'evolution' of the metalanguages of literary structuralism and semiotics into the metalanguages of poststructuralism. 3.1 The Heritage ofSaussure Saussure's (1960) formulation of synchronic linguistics as constituting an important part of a semiology which would study the life of signs in a society provided the basic concepts for the twentieth century's early structuralist/semiotic inquiry. His theory of language provided the terminology and, indeed, the methodology. The specific aspects of Saussure's linguistics which were borrowed as a model/metaphor for analyzing systems of meaning analogous to language, including the structure of literary texts and the nature of literariness, were small in number but have remained central to most literary and textual analysis. 3.1.1 Language as Synchronic System: Uses and Rewritings The concept of language as a synchronic system and the notion of linguistic opposition (the patterns of similarity and difference which determine the value of individual elements within the system) were among the most important ideas borrowed from Saussure. The related dichotomy langue/parole, which functioned in Saussure to exclude from the domain of linguistics what people actually did with language, in favor of an attempt to construct the abstract system which made that activity possible, has been a source of constant controversy. This dichotomy also involved the exclusion of the diachronic or the historical from the description of the synchronic or current state of a linguistic system. The notions of system and value have come in for much criticism in poststructuralist circles, and were already criticized by the Bakhtin Circle in Russia in the 1920s (Voloshinov 1973). Both concepts have to be seen in the context which produced both Saussure's linguistics and the early formalist work for which it became a model. The central tenets of both enterprises were in keeping with the latest ideas in the philosophy of science at the time, in particular Husserl's phenomenology and its links with and critique of nineteenthcentury positivism. The crucial aspect of this philosophy for both Saussure and the formalists was its emphasis not on the sensory experience of 'facts' as in positivism but on the role of intuition in enabling 'the direct grasp of the essences underlying the phenomenal world which provide it with its categorial identity' (Steiner 1984:255). This was the basis for Saussure's proposing a strict separation of what is linguistically phenomenal, individual, and accidental from what is essential, social, and rule-governed: langue (potential linguistic system) versus parole (actual speech). Langue would be the sole object of linguistics. In this, Saussure's Course in General Linguistics provided the young formalists with a program for what they wanted to achieve in literary studies: a science generated intrinsically on the basis of its own subject matter. Like language, literature is a social institution, a system governed by its own regularity and more or less independent of contiguous fields of culture. This was a conception of literature that informed Tynjanov's notion of literary history, Jakobson's poetics, and Tomashevsky's metrics (Steiner 1984: 175-85). Even within formalism, there was much variation in the way these ideas were used. The semiotic concept underlying Husserl's or Saussure's expressionist model is absolutely antidialogic. The identity of intrinsic linguistic meaning can only be preserved within the linguistic system, the potential that underlies linguistic activity: Saussurean linguistics is monologic. Even though the Course begins with a discussion of a dialogue between two disembodied heads, these heads are two identical instances of the same social consciousness: they are two terminals whose semiotic input and output are one, monologic. In these heads is langue, the set of all linguistic elements internalized by the linguistic community at any one time. All minds have the same content. These are the aspects of Saus-

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Literary Structuralism and Semiotics production and become available to a distant readership, which will project it against a poetic system different from the one that produced it. High literature was identified by Jakobson and Bogatyrev as distinct from folklore on the basis of its production and recep3.1.2 Jakobson and the Linguistic System Jakobson's concept of the linguistic system decon- tion. The immediacy of the oral performance of popustructed many of the classic Saussurean dichotomies. lar culture, its closeness to speech, and to the demands Saussure claimed that the causes of linguistic change of its conditions of production, made it a fact of (diachrony) are extrasystemic, accidental, and to be langue. If it was to be successfully received it had to excluded from synchronic description. Jakobson's correspond to the normative structure of a system and linguistics was profoundly dialectic, and this made fulfill its collective demands. Literature was more like any separation of the system from its history imposs- parole, dialogic and able to interact with many conible. For him, linguistic change is triggered by con- texts (quoted in Steiner 1984:228). This statement tradictions within language itself, and is subject to the would seem to be at odds with Jakobson's notion of rules of the system. The axis of succession (see below verbal art as a social institution, like language and for a discussion of syntagm in Saussure), the present like Saussure's system. The starting point of Jakobson's poetics was the synchronic moment of the linguistic signifier, is always impregnated with history. At the same time, the axis concept of the expression, a sign which referred only of simultaneity or choice (see 'paradigm' below), the to itself. The poetic function of language involved a potential that is the system in Saussure, consists in focus on the message for its own sake, and was the Jakobson of several simultaneous and overlapping centerpiece of a theory of the autonomy of the systems, not one. These are the functions of language aesthetic. The problem arose when Jakobson conmade famous in his 1960 paper, and the several sys- ceived of the semiotic identity of this sign in terms of tems of functional registers they give rise to. The sys- a Saussurean social and rule-governed system (which tem for him is a complex field of synchronic and would preserve its identity) but then relativized this diachronic elements, revolutionary and conservative system by rewriting langue as a series of historically forces, and it is in a constant state of disjunctive equi- changing functional varieties. Poetic language, driven libriums and disequilibriums. It is both a state and a by its need for incessant defamiliarization, exhibited the highest degree of change, and was thus, paraprocess of change. This rewriting of the linguistic system in Jakobson doxically, the least reliable function in terms of longderives from and is produced in interaction with his term semiotic identity (or intrinsic meaning, to use the work on the literary system. It is linked with the con- terminology used above). This was the basis for the linguistic principle of cept of defamiliarization in his discussions of the evolution of verbal art. The oscillation between the old, Jakobson's poetics. It is related to the issues that which has become automatized, and the new, which became popularized as the differences between 'ordidefamiliarizes, is never conceived of as a linear pro- nary' and 'poetic' language in the Prague School gression in which each new state of the literary system (Mukafovsky 1977). In Jakobson the literary work is simply leaves the last one 'automatized': the inter- always perceived against the basis of contemporary action of old and new which produces defam- 'ordinary' language. Poetic language is a superiliarization in art is an essentially dialogic structure built upon that system, and the aesthetic phenomenon—and dialogism here takes on in Jakob- functioning of the literary text depends upon that son's work many of the characteristics Bakhtin (1986) system. The same metaphor is in Eco's (1977) much will be attributed with having discovered. The system later formulation of the overcoding and extracoding is an ongoing struggle between antithetical tendencies that are required to make sense (a) of the literary and heterogeneous elements, and it is not internalized, conventions, the literary systems that constrain the as in Saussure, uniformly and totally by every speak- production of literary texts, and (b) the hypothesizing ing subject. This difference allows change, but pre- and Peircean abduction that is necessary to make sense of the aesthetic text as invention, its radical serves the system. Jakobson's expressionist debt to Husserl, which 'deautomatizing' moments. What preserves the possipreserved his belief in the system which underpinned bility of interpretation is the linguistic moment, the the potential subversiveness of dialogism, and his shared code of the common linguistic system. For interest in the dialogic, began to become incompatible. Jakobson and Eco, the writer and reader cannot be The problem of the literary and its relation to the totally isolated from each other as long as they share system was central. How far apart can a writer and a language. The literary text will make sense as an his readers be before they cease to share anything? utterance in that language, even projected against a What are the limits of the system? The problem of set of poetic norms or an aesthetic code that is alien writing became crucial, because writing makes it poss- to it. The interpretation of any literary text, for Jakobible for a literary work to transcend the moment of its son, will therefore always involve meanings that are surean linguistics which prompted Voloshinov's critique of the notion of intrinsic meaning and the linguistic system (1973:67ff).
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intrinsic to it by virtue of its participation in the system that is language. 3.1.3 The System and the Poetic Function of Language One of the major tenets of Jakobson (1960) was that language was functionally differentiated in relation to the significant elements of the communication situation. These he formulated as shown in (1): ADDRESSER CONTEXT MESSAGE CONTACT CODE
(1)

ADDRESSEE

The elements are related to six functions, one corresponding to each of the factors in the communication situation as shown in (2): EMOTIVE REFERENTIAL POETIC PHATIC METALINGUAL
(2) CONATIVE

erential function of language, lyric poetry (first person) is intimately linked with the emotive function, and second-person poetry is linked to the conative (see Sect. 3.3 below). For Jakobson, the problem of the relativity of literary interpretation was solved by this bond between functional varieties. The fact that even the poetic function always involved the referential actually limited the spatiotemporal dislocation which might threaten the identity of the literary work. The conservative system of 'ordinary' language was common to succeeding and different literary canons and sets of poetic norms. Although Jakobson claimed that 'every word of poetic language is in essence phonically and semantically deformed vis-a-vis practical language,' and that the aesthetic function is a specific variety 'governed by its own immanent laws,' he concluded that 'a poetic form cannot distort its material to such a degree that it loses its linguistic nature' (Steiner 1984:231). 3.1.4 Phonology and the Problem of Poetic Violence The structure that underpins all functional varieties is the phonological system of a given language. It was phonology that Jakobson chose as the key to the identity of the literary sign, even as he argued that it was phonological parallelism and repetition that produced semantic polysemy, ambiguity, and heterogeneity in the literary artefact. Phonology was an important element of Saussure's system. The focus on phonology, and the idea that the spoken is the original, authentic form of language, constituted what Derrida (1976) would call phonocentrism in Saussure. For Saussure and Jakobson, phonology controls the infinite semiosis that is a consequence of written language, the result of the process of spatiotemporal dislocation which relativizes the identity of the written sign. If writing is made secondary to an originary speech, merely a representation of it, then the cause of the semiotic slippage, written language, is eliminated. Saussure's contradictory and violent narrative, structured around the speech/writing binarism, of the violence done to speech by writing (1960: ch. 6), was the text Derrida chose for his deconstruction of the intrinsic meaning arguments in linguistics (1976). The intrinsic value of the verbal sign is guaranteed only while it remains within the synchronic system of langue, written as the science of the phone, the latter's amorphous multiplicity reduced to a limited inventory of elements and incorporated into the relational grid of similarities and differences that constitute that system. The voice in Saussure is logocentric, the voice of reason. The phoneme, the minimal unit of the signifier, is defined through its relationship to the signified, in terms of the rational differentiations in meaning that it enables within the system. Phonology offered Jakobson the solution to both his problems. As a mere

All messages were characterized by more than one function, and the dominant function (Jakobson "The dominant' 1935) in any one message specified it as belonging to one functional variety rather than another. The referential function, oriented towards the context, the so-called 'denotative' function of language, which 'refers' to the extralinguistic, is often regarded as the predominant linguistic function. But Jakobson demonstrated that every message also involves a number of other functions, and that many messages foreground functions other than the referential. The emotive function focuses on the addresser, offering a direct expression of the speaker's attitude to what he is speaking about. The conative function involves an orientation toward the addressee, and finds its clearest grammatical expression in the vocative and imperative. The phatic function is oriented towards contact, and functions primarily to establish and maintain communication. The metalingual function is focused on the code itself, but not only in scientific or theoretical modes of talking about language. Whenever speakers use language to check up on whether they are using the same code to explain meanings or to quote or refer to other language, they are using it metalingually. The function of language which focuses on the message for its own sake is the poetic function of language: this is the dominant function in verbal art. In all other functions it acts as a subsidiary constituent. On the other hand all the other functions also participate in verbal art: one cannot specify the particularities of different poetic genres 'without specifying the differently ranked participation of the other functions alongside the poetic function' (Jakobson 1981:26). Epic poetry (third person) involves the ref-

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secondary representation of sound, the written text must always be able to be read in relation to voice, the primary substance, and the basic structure of that substance is provided by the phonological structure of a given language. Phonology also solves the problem of the second cause of semiotic slippage, the distance between the participants in the literary process. Of all the systems of norms and stratal levels of organization that constitute language, the phonological system is the one that interlocutors must share if any dialogue is to take place. This postulate derives from the Saussurean concept of the double articulation of language. This says that all linguistic signifiers that carry meaning are made up of smaller elements that do not signify in themselves but function to differentiate meanings. These meaning-differentiating elements are the phonemes that constitute the most elementary linguistic system, and are indispensable to the semiotic functioning of language. Poetic violence cannot deform this system, or verbal art would lose its linguistic nature: thus the identity of the literary text is preserved from the relativism inherent in its dialogic interaction with different contexts by the stability of the phonological system and its insistence on intrinsic meaning. On the other hand, the poetic function in Jakobson's formulation foregrounds the phonological. What functions in ordinary language as a means to a communicative end, serves to defamiliarize the verbal medium in verbal art, and makes the structure of the verbal sign the focus of attention. As in the system itself, repetitions of sound in verbal art produce meaning: but here the repetitions are not constrained by the system, for the paradigmatic has already projected itself into the syntagm, and revolution is imminent. The issues raised by these incompatible tendencies in Jakobson's work surface in Julia Kristeva's work on revolution in poetic language. Her arguments for the aesthetic as a place of revolution are not the same as Jakobson's, to which she is greatly indebted in all other respects. While he saw phonology as the means of containing 'poetic violence,' she transforms his understanding of the role of phonology in poetry, reading only its revolutionary poetic aspects in Jakobson, its extrasystemic, transgressive potential. As she rewrites the linguistic metaphors with metaphors from psychoanalysis, phonology becomes the link with the body and the unconscious, and then with the repressed feminine and a rewritten semiotic. She refuses to identify the phonological with that aspect of the linguistic system which is beyond deformation, what she calls the symbolic and identifies as the patriarchal order of language. For her the phonological becomes the semiotic, the excess which is responsible for disruption of the fixity and rationality of the symbolic, the patriarchal system of language. Poetic violence she takes from Jakobson, but the nature of her revolution is very different from his. The difference comes from the psychoanalytic move which relates the Freudian or Lacanian conscious/unconscious binarism to her own symbolic/semiotic, the linguistic system/process, syntagm/paradigm, syntax/phonology binarisms and the cultural binarisms masculine/feminine, rational/ irrational, mind/body. In this scheme of things the unconscious is the place of the semiotic and all the repressed connections between the body and phonology. Phonology is the bodily source of, and not the rational and systemic constraint on, revolution. 3.1.5 Challenge and Deconstruction: Bakhtin and Prague School Positions The phonocentrism and logocentrism of Saussure were the subject of critique and deconstruction long before Derrida. The Bakhtin Circle in Russia in the 1920s offered a trenchant critique of Saussurean linguistics, and thoroughly rewrote formalist theories of language and the literary. For Voloshinov (1973) every sign was an ideological phenomenon, a reality standing for some other reality. For Medvedev (1978) the literary was an ideological phenomenon, a system of metasigns which 'refract what lies outside them,' that is, nonartistic, ideological phenomena. From a linguistic point of view, a sign that reflects another sign is exactly like an utterance that comments on, or replies to, or quotes another utterance. The process is inherently dialogic, and dialogue became a dominant metaphor in the semiotics of Bakhtin and Prague School members. Voloshinov argued that the formalists remained concerned with what he called the centripetal forces in language, the elements that make it systemic and monologic. The Bakhtin Circle was interested in the opposite tendencies: language as process, as an ongoing struggle between different points of view, different ideologies, a dialogue with other texts, and other voices; the heterogeneity of language. They took as their main target the formalist vision of a literary system independent of all other cultural domains. Bakhtin's late essays 'The Problem of the Text' and 'The Problem of Speech Genres' (1986) provide an overview of many of these concerns. The Prague School also rejected this view of literature as autonomous system. They argued that the poetic function never operated in isolation from the other contiguous structures with which it changed in time (the political, economic, ideological). Mukafovsky insisted on the semiotic point of view which would enable the theorist to recognize the existence and dynamism of the literary system, and to understand its development as a movement in constant dialectic with the development of other spheres of culture. Prague School aesthetics reveals its debts to both formalism and the Bakhtin School. 3.2 Signifier and Signified: Contrastive Meaning The arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign was essential to Saussurean linguistics. Arbitrariness was closely

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Truth and Meaning related to Saussure's rewriting of the sign (often previously read as simply the name for a thing) as the union of a concept (signified) and a sound image (signifier). This union, the relationship of sound and meaning, is arbitrary; the actual value or meaning of the sign depends on its relations of differential opposition with other signs within a system or code. The signifier is not a 'thing,' but part of a relational structure, and the signified is defined through relations of opposition, and not through being related to nonsemiotic entities or the 'world.' The fact that the concept 'tree' is related to different sound images in different languages, for example, arbre (French), Baum (German), and tree (English), is adduced as evidence for the arbitrary nature of the sound/meaning relationship that constitutes the unity of signified and signifier as sign. The fact that the sign for tree in English has the value it has, is due to its relationship to other signs that may share some aspects of its value or meaning but are significantly different from it: bush, vine, shrub,forest,fern, conifer, etc. Tree means what it does because these other signs exist to restrict its meaning: the distinctive feature of being a tree is constituted by what they are not. A sign acquires its value within a code or system which is a set of formally structured oppositions and differences. This is the source of the notion of intrinsic linguistic meaning discussed in Sect. 3.1.4. 3.2.1 Phonological Opposition and Binarism Jakobson and Trubetskoy, in the area of phonology, considerably developed the idea of language as a system of conventional oppositions or differences, when they analyzed the system of sound contrasts in language. If one begins otherwise similar words with distinctively different sounds, one will produce distinctively different words, different in meaning: for example, sin, din, tin. In other words, the contrasts between these sounds in English are functional. Such functionally different sounds are what Saussure, Jakobson, and Trubetskoy called phonemes. A central property of phonemes is that when one is substituted for another one gets contrasts in meaning. They are the contrastive and meaningful units of sound that constitute any particular linguistic system, distinguished from one another by two-way or binary contrasts, like voiced/unvoiced (s, t versus d\ fricative and nonfricative (s versus t, d), etc. This binary organization of the phonological system in Jakobson and Trubetskoy is a theoretical instance of what became a much more widely adopted principle in the structuralism of the 1940s and 1950s, associated with Jakobson and Levi-Strauss in New York and Paris. Structuralist analyses of anything from language to culture were characterized by this underlying principle of definition by contrast, so that the elements of a culture might be said to include such 'basic oppositions' as: male/female, culture/nature, rational/irrational, right/left, reason/madness, and so on. The narrative or ritual or mythic practices of a culture, including verbal art, were seen as functioning to resolve or synthesize, or otherwise make sense of, these binarisms that were inherent to their structure. There is a connection between this structuralist use of binarisms and narrative analysis, and later deconstructive methods and strategies developed by Jacques Derrida, and appropriated for feminism by Luce Irigaray (1985). Structuralism accepted the binarisms as objective structuring principles, and used binary analysis as a methodology for understanding the nature and function of cultural objects and narrative processes. Deconstruction sees binarisms as culturally biased and contingent ways of constructing what appear to be observed data. It points to the oppositional value systems that are built into binary structures: one term is defined in terms of the other (female is defined as what is not male); one term is positively valued and the other negatively. In the series above, in this culture, male, culture, rational, right, and reason would be valued positively against the elements that constitute the other sides of the pairs. Binarisms and narrative structures remain closely linked in deconstructive critique. Once these binarisms become constitutive of a culture and its texts, only certain narratives, plot structures, heroes, and denouements are possible. The focus of deconstructive work in later critical cultural and semiotic analysis has been to unsettle the taken-for-granted nature of these binarisms and the narratives they structure. The aim is not simply to reverse the value systems, nor to resolve the differences, as in structuralist methodology, but rather to question the very existence of the binary opposition itself as a structuring principle, and to attempt to show that the members of a binary pair are unique in their differences and not definable in terms of one another. Derrida's rewriting of Saussure, and Luce Irigaray's rewriting of Freud, are two typical examples of this deconstructive methodology. It is arguable that without structuralism's prior investigations of these issues they might not have been so early on the deconstructive and feminist agendas. 3.3 Syntagm and Paradigm: Versions of the Poetic Function The syntagm/paradigm opposition in Saussure is concerned with relations of combination (one thing after another, the linearity of the signifier) and of choice (one thing instead of another at a particular point in the signifying chain). The horizontal axis of language, its chain relationships, is the syntagm. The vertical axis, the sets of choices which are available to fill particular slots in the chain, are called paradigms. The system consists of a set of paradigms or choices, and a set of rules which enable elements of these sets to be combined to form chains of signifying elements:

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The cattle Those mice Cats All felines drink from the creek meet near those bushes sleep on every branch frolic

(3)

In the examples in (3), the horizontal sequences are formed grammatically, according to rule, by choosing from the paradigms of elements which form the system, which can be identified with the vertical columns. The, those, and all are all choices of the same kind, which can fill the first slot in this kind of sequence: similarly cattle, mice, cats, and felines, and so on. This concept of language as system is based on the idea that what is paradigmatic, the alternative sets of equivalent choices available within the system, is never constitutive of the syntagm, which is by definition characterized by difference not similarity, by the combination of significantly different elements. It is difference that constitutes value or meaning at the level of the syntagm, just as it is at the basic level of the phoneme. When Jakobson (1960:27) defined the poetic function of language as projecting 'the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination,' he argued that in verbal art, in contradistinction to the normal state of affairs in language, 'equivalence becomes the constitutive device of the sequence' (italics added). Parallelism at all levels of phonological structure, from stress, alliteration, and rhyme to intonation constitutes the poetic syntagm. The phonological structure is built around patterns of binary oppositions, stress/unstress, sameness of sound, and difference in meaning (e.g., rhyme), rising and falling tones or beats, and the parallelisms that arise from recurrent metrical, stanzaic, and other generic forms such as the sonnet. Jakobson showed that within the system which is the poetic text, 'equivalence in sound, projected into the sequence as its constitutive principle, inevitably involves semantic equivalence' (1960:40). Words similar in sound are drawn together in meaning. Phonological parallelism is frequently accompanied by grammatical parallelism which serves to increase the ambiguity and semantic richness of the 'double-sensed message' (1960) and 'The supremacy of the poetic function over the referential function does not obliterate the reference but makes it ambiguous' (1960:42). The split reference of the double-voiced message finds its correspondence in a split addresser and a split addressee. Hence Jakobson's enduring interest in linguistic shifters, particularly pronouns, and in the issue of a subjectivity constructed in language. Shifters were of interest to him, as they were to Benveniste (1986), because they are distinguished from all other constituents in the linguistic code by their compulsory reference to the message and its context. They are a complex category where code (langue) and message (parole) overlap, where meaning cannot be established

without reference to the context. They therefore offer another instance, like the poetic function of language, where the strict separation of langue and parole will not work (1957a: 132). Jakobson's analysis of split subjectivity was of particular interest to later structuralists and semioticians in the 1960s and 1970s, as subjectivity, and the construction and positioning of the subject in language, became issues for a semiotics and poststructuralism that were rethinking the humanist subject in the light of linguistic, semiotic, discursive, narrative, and psychoanalytic theories. 3.4 Jakobson and Levi-Strauss: Textual Analysis Jakobson's analysis of the poetic text as system, and of the poetic function of language, inevitably questioned the Saussurean notion of system, particularly if it is remembered that the poetic function is constitutive of but not limited to poetic texts. The emphasis on the sound/meaning nexus in poetry meant that the 'arbitrariness' of the linguistic sign had to be questioned and rewritten. The projection of the paradigmatic into the syntagmatic meant that the text as utterance contained the system, was indeed the only place where the system could be. The text became both product and process, and this weakened the opposition between langue and parole. These were the subversive elements in Jakobson that Julia Kristeva, Umberto Eco, and Jacques Derrida would find most compatible with their own poststructuralist enterprises. For Kristeva they were elements that also connected with her discovery of Bakhtin, whose work in these areas was in fact much earlier than Jakobson's. These ideas were expressed by Jakobson quite late, much later than his work with the formalists. For him these were the characteristics of the poetic function of language, not of all functions and, as suggested above, he sought to contain the subversiveness of these elements (see Sect. 3.1.4 above). The relevant analyses are (with L. G. Jones) 'Shakespeare's Verbal Art in "Th'Expense of Spirit"' and (with Claude LeviStrauss) '"Les Chats" de Charles Baudelaire.' They are among many such analyses published in various languages in Volume III of Jakobson's Selected Writings (1981), but they are the two best known in the English-speaking context. Both are typical examples of the binary structuralist methodology, relying on the patterns of variables that constitute the texts to provide meanings intrinsic to the texts as systems. The paper on 'Les Chats' describes the poetic text in ways which anticipate Barthes' later 'discovery' of'readerly' (closed) and 'writerly' (open) texts (1967a). The position taken by Jakobson and Levi-Strauss anticipates by some considerable time later versions of the 'open' text. These derive variously from linguistics-based structuralism, from the revival of Bakhtinian carnival in Kristeva's work, or from the insertion into the reading process of the psychoanalytic unconscious
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Truth and Meaning and of pleasure, drives, and the body in the later Barthes and Kristeva (Barthes 1975; Kristeva 1984). Eco's differently derived but related Peircean and Hjelmslevian construct of the open text was formulated considerably later. As Jakobson and Levi-Strauss explain in the paper on 'Les Chats' (1962:385-86), the poetic text is described first, as consisting of patterns of variables (or paradigms) which exist 'on a number of superimposed levels: phonological, phonetic, syntactic, prosodic, semantic etc.,' and then as consisting of 'systems of equivalences which fit inside one another and which offer, in their totality, the appearance of a closed system.' This is what gives the poem 'the value of an absolute object.' And yet there is another way of looking at it 'whereby the poem takes on the appearance of an open system in dynamic progression from beginning to end.' The progress from the structuralism of Saussure is very considerable. The extension of these principles to other kinds of texts, to nonpoetic texts, is also immanent in this analysis. Referring to his own earlier use of Jakobson's work in his analysis of myth (1963), Levi-Strauss speaks of the opposition that he set up between poetry and myth. He argues that the difference between poetry and myth is that the poetic text contains the system of variables which are the multiple levels of the paradigmatic projected into the syntagm, while the mythic text lacks this principle of equivalence. It can be interpreted only on the semantic level, and the system of variables which constitute it can only be established outside the text, in the multiplicity of versions of the same myth. What is important however is that the system is to be found in texts, that is, in instances of parole, and that it is constituted by patterns of repetition. There is a version of the ordinary/poetic language binarism at work in the qualitative difference that is perceived to distinguish the language of poetry and myth, but even that is questioned when Levi-Strauss acknowledges that the methods of analysis of poetry and myth 'in the final analysis, can be substituted for one another' (1963:373). In 1963 he had argued that:
Among all social phenomena language alone has thus far been studied in a manner which permits it to serve as the object of truly scientific analysis, allowing us to understand its formative process and to predict its mode of change. This results from modern researches into the problems of phonemics... The question which now arises is this: is it possible to effect a similar reduction in the analysis of other forms of social phenomena? of such relations, and it is only as bundles that these relations can be put to use and combined so as to produce meaning. (Levi-Strauss 1963:58-59, 210-11)

This was the question that 'The Structural Analysis of Myth' set out to answer, and answered in the affirmative:
Myth is language... myth like the rest of language is made up of constituent units... The true constituent units of myth are not the isolated relations but bundles

The analysis showed that the syntagm of any single version of a myth was a selection of choices from the bundles of paradigmatic relations that constituted the system of that myth as a whole in the form of its many different textual realizations. These poststructuralist moments in classic structuralist texts had a number of consequences. They finally put paid to the old distinction between ordinary and poetic language, as structuralist semioticians extended the use of the structuralist methodology beyond the analysis of the literary to the analysis of cultural texts of all kinds, in not only verbal media, and took up the agendas of the Bakthin and Prague Schools to explore the relations of the literary as semiotic system to other semiotic systems and institutional practices. This agenda became a particularly urgent one as poststructuralist theory—this time in the form of Foucault's work on discourse, power, subjectivity, and institutions—set out to explore some of the same questions from a perspective that polemically rejected linguistics, structuralism, and semiotics, but remained in many ways structuralist-functionalist and constructivist in its major premises. Another major consequence was the result of the correlation in Levi-Strauss's (1963) work of the poetic, the mythic, and the scientific. This correlation, summarized in his statement that 'logic in mythical thought is as rigorous as that of modern science' (1963:230) had important ramifications in the deconstruction of a number of structuralist binarisms. The primitive/cultured opposition is the first to be at risk, but the prose/poetry, fact/fiction oppositions cannot be far behind in this context. Thus, paradoxically, while structuralist/semiotic research, following these early leads in Jakobson, Levi-Strauss, and elsewhere, took up the challenge of studying the literary as social institution in its relations of specificity and difference to other social institutions such as the law, religion, science, economics, specifying the register and genre of texts produced in and through these institutional practices, the very same classic structuralist texts also contributed to the poststructuralist deconstruction of the boundaries and framing procedures that would be so established. The 'poststructuralist' effort, which is never entirely separate from the semiotics that is contemporary with it in the 1960s and 1970s, set about establishing the essentially fictional, metaphoric, and constructed nature of all language and of all texts and genres. It was not concerned, as Levi-Strauss was, with demonstrating the scientific nature of myth and poetry, but rather the poetic and mythical nature of science. The links had been made, and they were not insignificant in the later poststructuralist and feminist work

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Literary Structuralism and Semiotics on the literary (narrative and metaphoric) qualities of all texts. Despite all these anticipations of later literary structuralism and semiotics, the structuralist work of Jakobson and Levi-Strauss remained an intrinsic structuralism, which did not theorize the reading or writing subject, and which did not theorize the relations of texts to their contexts, nor move beyond the denotative level of linguistic analysis. The function of connotative semiotics in making sense of myth or poetry as explored later by Barthes in S/Z, for example, was not even considered. Nor was what Barthes would later call the myth of the denotative level itself ever raised in this context: 'denotation is not the first meaning, but pretends to be so... the superior myth by which the text pretends to return to the nature of language, to language as nature' (1974:9). The reader was assumed to know what Levi-Strauss and Jakobson knew: structuralist facts were transparent and the same for everyone. Levi-Strauss could confidently say: 'We shall use the Oedipus myth, which is well known to everyone' (1963:213). And his readings of the bundles of relations he finds in the system of that myth, presented as if they were intrinsic to the text and the system, are of course connotative readings, structured by binarisms, and produced in relation to cultural and hermeneutic codes that only a reader constructed and positioned as a highly trained and educated structural anthropologist would produce. 3.5 Metaphor and Metonymy Jakobson linked the principles of similarity and parallelism that constituted the code or the paradigm, and metaphor, which always involves saying one thing in terms of another. These similarity relations were particularly in evidence in the case of the metalinguistic function and its focus on the code through paraphrase, and in the poetic function with its focus on the message. On the other hand, he connected the constitutive role of difference in the syntagm, its patterns of contiguity which always involved relations of parts to wholes in the context of the linearity of the signifier, to metonymy. As so often with Jakobson, the insights come from phonology. Speaking of the exchange between the cat and Alice in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland: '"Did you say pig or fig!" said the Cat. "I said pig," replied Alice'—he points out that in her response Alice makes a choice between 'the distinctive feature stop versus continuant,' and combines this choice with certain other features combined into a bundle of distinctive features, called the phoneme, in this case the phoneme /p/. This is then followed by the phonemes l\l and /g/, themselves bundles of distinctive features. 'Hence the concurrence of simultaneous entities and the concatenation of successive entities are the two ways in which we speakers combine linguistic constituents' (Jakobson 1957b: 242). Here in fact is what he would define as the poetic function established as a constitutive feature of all language. He speaks (Jakobson 1957b:243) in the same context of the 'ascending scale of freedom' with which the speaker operates as he moves from the phonemic level, where choices are fully established by the code, to the levels of word, sentence, or utterance where 'the freedom of any individual speaker to create novel utterances increases substantially.' Every sign is made up however of constituent signs and occurs in combination with other signs. This means that every linguistic unit is simultaneously a context for simpler units and has its own context in a more complex unit. 'Combination and contexture are two faces of the same operation.' This leads him to a critique of Saussure's concepts of the operation of syntagm and paradigm, as mutually exclusive, and of the linearity of the sign. He argues that Saussure recognized only the temporal sequence, and not the two varieties of concatenation and concurrence in the linguistic signifier: he 'succumbed to the traditional belief in the linear character of language "qui exclut la possibilite deprononcer deux elements a lafois".' According to Jakobson, the constituents of a context are in a state of contiguity (metonymy), while the elements of a substitution set are linked by various degrees of similarity (metaphor). It is these two operations which provide every linguistic sign with two interpretants (he quotes Peirce's use of this term), one which links the sign internally to the code and the other which links it externally to the context. Every sign has a meaning that derives from the code, and meanings derived from its contextual relations with other signs in a sequence. It is the first that for Jakobson ensures the transmission of the message between addresser and addressee. The context he was talking about was internal to the linguistic system. Halliday has used the same insights to explore the internal semiotics of texts, the metonymic and metaphoric relations between clause and text grammars (1980), and his concept of grammatical metaphor also works to explore metaphoric and metonymic relations internal to the linguistic system (1985: ch. 10). His textual function of language however and his theory of the relations between texts and the semiotic constructs that are their contexts (a realizational relation) begins to provide a linguistic account of similar relations that are external to the system. Jakobson's important insights about the simultaneity of metaphor and metonymy to every linguistic sign could easily have been extended to describe the metonymic and metaphoric relations with contexts external to the text that are the stuff of Hjelmslev's connotative semiotics, and at issue in Levi-Strauss's reading of the Oedipus myth. Nevertheless, once it was recognized that the paradigmatic was always constitutive of the syntagmatic, of textuality, as discussed above, the recognition of the essential
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Truth and Meaning metaphorcity of all language was an inevitable consequence of Jakobson's position. This helped to break down the dichotomy Saussure's work had set up, and provided one of those crucial insights that would go on taking effect as the critical perspectives of poststructuralist theory developed to thinking about all texts and genres as essentially fictional in the sense of being always metaphors. Jakobson made it clear that the denotative level of meaning, which was theorized as intrinsic to the linguistic system, actually operated connotatively, as Barthes argued, on the basis of metaphor (similarity and paraphrase relations), metonymy (part/whole relations), and indexicality (pointing relations involving the overlap of code and message and again part/ whole relations). It was not so clear what would make connotative semiotics (which would relate the patterns in a text by way of the subjectivity of its readers, to contexts extrinsic to it) any different. Such relations involve paradigmatic relations of similarity which enable a reader to 'gloss' metalinguistically the fact that this word or larger chunk of text is similar to that one, to read this as a metaphor for that. They involve metonymy, relations of contiguity with contexts that are recognized as part/whole relations: this chunk of text is part of that whole context and can be made sense of accordingly. And they involve indexicality. These ideas were the basis for Barthes' later turning to this kind of semiotic, instead of the intrinsically linguistic, to decode or 'read' Sarrasine. The concepts are already theorized but never realized in Jakobson or in the structuralist textual work of Halliday. Missing from both is the role of the reader (Eco 1981b). These were the connections that Eco made when he used metaphor as an illustration of the process of unlimited semiosis. Metaphor as resemblance is only definable through the metonymic chains of association in which it is imbedded. These chains of association are, in effect, an infinite chain of interpretants, a network of culturally agreed metonymies, contiguities between signifiers and signifieds, in the code, in the co-text, and in the referent. The entire 'global semantic space,' to use Eco's formulation, becomes a network of metaphors built on contiguity. Here, in essence, are the concepts that would lead to the radical unsettling of the order of things in literary structuralism and semiotics referred to in the previous section. This is the moment when literary theories, theories of what it is to be literature, are suddenly recontextualized and used as technologies for rewriting the rules of what it is to be not literature. What was ordinary or practical language in formalist, Prague School, and structuralist work suddenly becomes the focus of a new kind of literary activity. If everything is metaphor, or narrative, or myth, if everything is discursively constructed, if genres can be rewritten, then there has been a very considerable deconstruction
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of the fact/fiction, primitive/cultured, feminine/ masculine, rational/irrational dichotomies. Contemporary French culture is rewritten as myth (Barthes 1983). Eco defines semiosis as everything that can be used to tell a lie, and rewrites presidential speeches as narrative strategies of lying (Eco 1985); history and anthropology are rewritten as literature, fiction (White 1978; Clifford and Marcus 1986). Ethnography is relocated with 'us' not 'them' (Pratt 1986). The categories that emerge from all this structuralist, semiotic, and poststructuralist literary activity are reappropriated from poststructuralism as a metalanguage for exploring the social semiotics of the metaphors and metonymies of text/reader/context interactions (Kress and Threadgold 1988) and this social semiotic and poststructuralist work negotiates and makes use of strategies of analysis that have a long and complex archaeology in structuralist texts which it is supposed to have moved beyond, and which continue to coexist alongside it in discontinuous and overlapping series. Poststructuralism, feminism, deconstruction, literary structuralism, and semiotics continue to coexist as never quite separable phenomena, characterized by discontinuities and incompatibilities that belie the usual stories of measured and logical evolution from literary structuralism and semiotics to its feminist, psychoanalytic, Foucauldian, and deconstructive 'posts.' That heterogeneity and difference are what characterize literary structuralism and semiotics today.
Bibliography Aers D, Hodge B, Kress G 1981 Literature, Language and Society in England 1580-1680. Gill and Macmillan, Dublin Bakhtin M M, Holquist M (eds.) 1981 (trans. Emerson C, Holquist M) The Dialogic Imagination. University of Texas Press, Austin, TX Bakhtin M M, Emerson C (eds., trans.) 1984 Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Manchester University Press, Manchester Bakhtin M M, Emerson C, Holquist M (eds.) 1986 The problem of speech genres: The problem of the text. In: (trans. McGee V) Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. University of Texas Press, Austin, TX Barthes R 1967a (trans. Lavers A, Smith C) Writing Degree Zero. Hill and Wang, New York Barthes R 1967b (trans. Lavers A, Smith C) Elements of Semiology. Hill and Wang, New York Barthes R 1974 (trans. Miller R) S/Z. Hill and Wang, New York Barthes R 1975 (trans. Miller R) The Pleasure of the Text. Hill and Wang, New York Barthes R 1983 Myth today. In: (trans. Lavers A) Mythologies. Jonathan Cape, London Benveniste E 1986 The semiology of language. In: Innis R E (ed.) Semiotics: An Introductory Reader. Hutchinson, London Birch D, OToole M (eds.) 1988 Functions of Style. Pinter, London

Philosophical reflection on meaning is as old as philosophy. Plato, confronted by the sophists, found that he needed to theorize about language and its meaning in order to escape from his opponents' sophistry (cf. Euthydemus, Sophist)', and he went on to open the debate concerning the extent to which language is conventional (cf. Cratylus). Aristotle took matters much further: in De Interpretations, he introduced a subject-predicate analysis of sentences, and in his logical writings this analysis is developed into a theory about the semantic roles of the terms that occur in sentences. The resulting theory provided the framework for most subsequent writing on the subject at least until the end of the medieval period. This included a great deal of sophisticated work on logic and the semantic roles (suppositio, appellatio) of terms. Many of the issues raised in these early investigations have remained in contention, but the focus for this article will be the subtle and varied developments in theories of meaning in postmedieval philosophy.
1. Ideas and Meanings

A central issue in philosophical debates about meaning concerns the relationship between semantics and psychology. One can obtain a route into these debates by pursuing the fate of the characteristic thesis of early modern philosophy-that, as Locke put it, 'Words in their primary or immediate Signification, stand for nothing, but the Ideas in the Mind of him that uses them' (Locke 1698: 3.2.2). The presumption here was that the relationship between ideas and the world is straightforward, at least in the case of certain simple ideas; and that the relationship between language and the world should be explicated in terms of the former relationship. Thus, on this view, semantics is reduced to psychology. One objection, stressed by Hegel, concentrates on the role of language in providing the essential means for the articulation of complex thoughts; Hegel had poetry primarily in mind, but one can equally think
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of scientific speculation. Since these thoughts are dependent upon language, it is argued, the reduction of semantics to psychology cannot be carried out. But this objection is not decisive: even Locke held that certain complex ideas were only held together by the common use of language. He could allow this role to language because of his distinction between simple and complex ideas, and this exemplifies the route standardly employed in responding to the objection: upholders of a psychologistic position argue that one can have simple thoughts without language, and that a language introduced on their basis then provides the means for the more complex thoughts which are language-dependent. A different objection concerns the anxiety that, if meanings are merely 'ideas in the mind of him that uses them,' then they are subjective and perhaps idiosyncratic; the very idea of communication becomes problematic. Again, Locke anticipated this objection; but here his response is problematic. He suggests that as long as people agree in paradigmatic situations about the application of names for simple ideas, communication can proceed successfully even if individuals' ideas are in fact quite different. This only provides a general solution to the problem if the identity of all ideas is fixed via that of the simple ones; Locke took this view, though it commits him to a deeply implausible empiricist reductionism. But what is more worrying is that if he allows that communication can succeed despite differences in the ideas signified for speakers by words, it seems to follow that the theory of ideas does not have a central role in the theory of communication. Locke's difficulty here is connected with a general difficulty that his approach faces, namely that of clarifying what a simple idea is an idea of. Locke suggests that simple ideas are abstracted from senseexperiences in a way which implies that they have qualitative features which makes their content immediately available to introspection. But this con-

Meaning: Philosophical Theories ception of ideas as, in effect, mental images is untenable. Complex thoughts are certainly not just complicated images; indeed, the details of imagery are usually irrelevant to a thought's identity. Furthermore, as Berkeley observed, one cannot abstract from one's perceptions of triangles a single image which will fit all triangles. Finally, as Wittgenstein showed (Wittgenstein 1934), tempting though it is to say that what makes an image an image of red is that it is itself red, in truth the subjectively manifest qualities of an image do not determine which objective qualities it is an image of. Given different contexts or causal histories, images with the same subjective qualities can be images of different things. It is clear from all this that improved versions of the psychologistic thesis will not rely on introspective psychology and will need to provide an account of communication which explains more clearly than Locke does why meaning is fundamentally psychological. However, before looking at proposals to this effect, alternative approaches to the concept of meaning need to be considered. 2. GottlobFrege The characteristic feature of Frege's approach is his concept of 'sense' (Sinn). He distinguished the sense of an expression from its 'reference' (Bedeutung), the object or property which it would normally be taken to stand for, in order to account for differences of meaning among expressions with the same reference— for example, different names of the same planet (Frege 1892). Since Frege also held, most emphatically, that senses are not in any way psychological, he concluded that senses belong to an abstract, but objective, 'third realm' (Frege 1918): they are depsychologized ideas and thoughts, abstract representations whose association with a linguistic expression determines that expression's reference. Among senses, the senses of sentences are fundamental; words have sense only insofar as they contribute to the sense of sentences in which they occur. This thesis of Frege's contrasts with the priority assigned by Locke to names of simple ideas and with the autonomous significance of terms within Aristotelian semantics. Yet Frege also recognized that people understand a sentence by understanding its constituent phrases—this is his compositionality thesis. This does not conflict with the priority of sentence meaning; for in understanding a phrase, one grasps in abstraction its contribution to the sense of sentences in which it occurs. Frege's sense/reference distinction, his compositionality thesis, and his emphasis on the semantic priority of sentences are fundamental advances in our understanding of meaning. But many philosophers disliked the 'Platonism' of his abstract conception of sense. In some cases, the proposed cure was worse than the disease. Russell, who was as hostile to psychologism as Frege, rejected Frege's sense/reference distinction and tried to base a conception of meaning upon reference to the objects of immediate experience. Quite apart from the difficulties in explaining how shared meaning is possible if meaning is founded only upon reference to objects of immediate experience, Russell discovered that without a sense/reference distinction he could not give a satisfactory account of the possibility of meaningful, but false, sentences. What was needed was not a repudiation of Frege's categories, but a way of fitting them into a broader framework that harmonized with a tenable philosophy of mind. Wittgenstein seemed to offer a way forward here: rejecting as illusory the Fregean thesis that 'what must be added to the dead signs in order to make a live proposition is something immaterial,' he proposed that 'if we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we should have to say that it was its use' (Wittgenstein 1934: 4).
3. Meaning and Use

The question is then how the injunction to ground an account of the meaning of language on its use is to be developed. Empiricists interpreted it in the light of their emphasis on ostensive definitions. As mentioned in connection with Locke, this approach provides a way in which attributions of meaning can be rendered public, by defining meanings in terms of the types of evidence which would verify or falsify sentences. Yet this seems to imply that the meaning of all sentences, however theoretical, should be definable in terms of observable evidence alone; and though some logical positivists embraced this conclusion, its reductionist conclusions were recognized as unacceptable—for example, that the meaning of sentences concerning the past or the future should be given in terms of present evidence for their truth or falsehood. This, however, is not the end for empiricist conceptions of meaning. Quine argued that reductionist implications can be avoided by taking account of the holistic structure of evidence (the 'Duhem-Quine thesis') and incorporating this into a holistic conception of meaning (Quine 1960). Quine's position rests on an empiricist, indeed behaviorist, insistence that attributions of meaning be grounded on the dispositions of speakers to assent or dissent to stimuli; but although he allows that the meaning of 'observationsentences' can be thus defined, he denies that this is generally the case, since for most sentences, there is no determinate package of stimuli that determines assent or dissent. The dispositions of speakers depend upon their other beliefs, and one can indefinitely permute attributions of meaning and ascriptions of belief while remaining faithful to all the behavioral evidence. However Quine does not then hold that it makes no sense to attribute meaning to individual sentences (other than observation sentences); his position is articulated through the fiction of the radical translator, the ideal anthropologist who aims to translate
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Truth and Meaning native talk solely on the basis of his observations of view meaning, as traditionally conceived, is a 'realist' native assent and dissent to stimuli. Quine's claim illusion. This radical alternative is one which Saul Kripke is that the behavioral evidence, however extended, underdetermines the translation of individual has suggested should be embraced anyway in the light sentences, and, since this evidence is all there is to of Wittgenstein's 'rule-following' argument (Kripke attributions of meaning, their translation is radically 1982). As reconstructed by Kripke, this argument indeterminate. Nonetheless, relative to one of the starts from the thesis that there is nothing in a speakempirically acceptable schemes of translation of the er's use of language, in either past practice or linguistic native language, translation of single sentences can be dispositions, which determines how words used by that speaker should be applied to future cases: even achieved. Quine's conclusion seems no less problematic than if there is a natural rule of projection ('green' has the reductionist one that he sought to avoid. For the previously been applied only to green things, so on indeterminacy thesis cannot be restricted to alien the next occasion it will be correct to describe somelanguages: it must begin at home, if at all. Yet, one thing as 'green' just in case it is green), there is nothing cannot easily acknowledge that the meanings of one's in principle to rule out a deviant rule ('green' has own utterances, including those in which the inde- previously been applied only to green things, but on terminacy thesis itself is formulated, are radically inde- the next occasion it will be correct to describe a thing terminate. To avoid this conclusion, Dummett has as 'green' just in case it is blue). Yet, the argument argued that Quine's semantic holism should be continues, the traditional concept of meaning implies rejected in favor of a 'molecular' conception of mean- that the assignment to a sentence (e.g., 'grass is green') ing according to which meaning is given by a deter- of a definite meaning (that grass is green) prescribes minate specification of the kinds of evidence relevant in advance under what conditions the sentence is true to the assertion or denial of sentences of various types. (namely, when grass is green). Hence, Kripke conThis position implies that one can give a nonholistic cludes, since this traditional concept cannot be account of the evidence which warrants the assertion grounded in the use of language by speakers, it should of sentences containing theoretical terms; not sur- be rejected as illusory, and instead one should embrace prisingly, this denial of the Duhem-Quine thesis is the antirealist account which limits itself to an external much contested. But a more pressing question is description of the practices of speakers, including their whether Dummett avoids the reductionism that practices of correcting each other. It will be obvious that this 'skeptical' conclusion is Quine's holism enables him to escape. Dummett's answer, which he connects with even more paradoxical than that of Quine, which it Wittgenstein's thesis that meaning is use, is that the extends. In Wittgenstein's writings, the rule-following link between meaning and evidence concerns the considerations are associated with his criticisms of any 'assertibility-conditions' of sentences rather than their Lockean approach which attempts to ground meaning truth-conditions (Dummett 1978). One side of this is on introspective psychology; hence Wittgenstein straightforward: assuming that there is an intrinsic emphasizes the importance of 'blind' rule-following, link between meaning and truth-conditions (a point assertion unguided by introspective directions (Wittwhich is revisited below), the characterization of the genstein 19S3). One can accept this, but question existence of some type of evidence as the truth- Kripke's extension of the argument in one of two condition of a sentence implies that the sentence ways, depending on one's attitude to the relation merely means that there is evidence of that kind. What between psychology and semantics. Those who hold is less clear is how it helps to describe the evidence as that semantic facts are irreducible to psychological the sentence's assertibility-condition. The explanation ones welcome Kripke's negative argument, but hold suggested by Dummett's self-description as 'anti- that it does not follow that meaning is an abstract realist' is that meaning is fundamentally an epistemic illusion; instead, they hold, people's lives—their matter, so that an account of the meaning of a sen- reasonings and actions—are permeated by an involvetence is based upon an account of the types of evidence ment with meanings which does not need to be which warrant its assertion or denial. As long as it is grounded in anything else. By contrast, those who then held that such an account is not an account accept the reducibility of semantics to psychology of its truth-condition, the reductionist conclusion is hold that once a description of the use of language avoided. But there still remains the question of how includes both its social context and the underlying its truth-condition is determined. One alternative causal facts concerning human psychology, it is poss(advocated more clearly by Peacocke (1986) than by ible to understand how meaning does not transcend Dummett himself) is that these types of evidence physical fact. suffice to identify a distinct possible state of affairs as the sentence's truth-condition. Another, more radical, 4. Truth-conditions and Meaning alternative is just to deny that an account of meaning Donald Davidson's position exemplifies the first altershould yield an account of truth-conditions. On this native (Davidson 1984). Like Quine and Dummett,
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Meaning: Philosophical Theories Davidson starts from an empiricist constraint, that all facts about meaning must be manifest somehow in the use of language, and he puts this constraint to work in the importance which he assigns to the fiction of radical interpretation—his variant of Quine's fiction of radical translation. The shift from 'translation' to 'interpretation' represents Davidson's rejection of Quine's behaviorist conception of meaning in favor of an approach based upon an account of the truthconditions of sentences. It seems at first that the concept of truth-conditions is too weak to capture that of meaning, since it is entirely extensional (so that all true sentences have the same truth-conditions). But Davidson's insight was to propose that an account of the meaning of a sentence is provided by that account of its truth-conditions which is generated by a theory which (a) assigns correct truth-conditions to the sentences of the speaker's language on the basis of assignments of contributory roles to the phrases of the language and to their manners of combination (the holistic condition) and (b) yields an interpretation of the language which can be integrated into a satisfactory understanding of the linguistic and other acts of the speakers (the empirical condition). So, Davidson does not simply identify meaning with truth-conditions; rather, for him, the meaning of a sentence is that account of its truthconditions which explains its role within the language and its use by speakers. Davidson's approach implies that a radical interpreter is able to assign truth-conditions to native sentences without a prior understanding of them. He maintains that the interpreter can legitimately achieve this by observing the distinctive conditions under which the natives hold various sentences to be true, and then assuming that these conditions are, for the most part, truth-conditions for these sentences. This assumption of truth for the most part (the principle of charity) is justified by Davidson by means of an externalist theory of psychological content, that, by and large, beliefs are about their external causes. But Davidson stresses that this assumption of truth brings with it an assumption of widespread agreement; for, of course, all interpreters take their own beliefs to be true. Thus, for Davidson, the radical interpreter initially projects onto the natives the interpreter's own beliefs and preferences in assigning truth-conditions to native utterances and uses these as the defeasible basis for a rational understanding of action, including speech acts. This presumption of agreement is a key component of Davidson's nonreductive approach; one can interpret others on the basis of their observed behavior only because one brings to that interpretation one's own understanding of the world and oneself. Critics have urged that this presumption is both parochial and insecure. It is parochial because it implies that one's own beliefs and preferences set the limits of intelligibility. It is insecure since Davidson's own theory threatens self-understanding. The threat arises from the possibility of replicating Quine's indeterminacy thesis within Davidson's conception of radical interpretation: as Davidson has sometimes seemed ready to acknowledge, his conception does not incorporate any guarantee that a unique interpretation will emerge. But if more than one interpretation is held to be possible, and one then recognizes that it applies to oneself, it threatens one's own self-understanding and equally the significance of the procedures of radical interpretation.
5. Psychology and Meaning

These difficulties in Davidson's position make it all the more important to consider the alternative which reduces semantics to psychology. This has two parts: an account of meaning in terms of psychological and social facts (beliefs, intentions, and conventions), and an account of these facts which shows that they are not dependent upon semantic facts. The first part draws on the work of H. P. Grice and David Lewis; the second part looks to cognitive science. Grice proposed the following account of speaker-meaning (Grice 1957): a speaker S means that/? by a declarative utterance of x to an audience A if and only if (a) S intends that A should come to believe that p; (b) S intends that A should recognize that S uttered x with intention (a); and (c) S intends that this recognition (b) should be among A's reasons for coming to believe that p. Subsequent discussion showed that a further condition is required: (d) S does not have any further intentions in uttering x of which A is unaware. Although further refinements have been proposed, there is a broad consensus that conditions (a-d) are at least sufficient for speaker-meaning. But two issues now arise: what is required in supposing that conditions (a-d) are satisfied; and how one is to move on from an account of speaker-meaning to an account of the meaning of sentences. One can try to solve the first problem for a few cases by thinking of S making appropriate iconic gestures and noises; but this is clearly very limited and offers no route to a solution of the second problem. Of course, if one could already rely on a solution to the second problem, then that would bring a solution to the first one; but that would subvert the strategy of basing an account of sentencemeaning upon that of speaker-meaning. Lewis's account of conventions offers a way forward here (Lewis 1969). Lewis argued on general grounds that conventions, such as driving on the left, are regularities which coordinate the behavior of agents with interests which will be satisfied if and only if almost everyone abides by the same regularity; the need for a convention arises where it is not obvious in advance which regularity others will adhere to. Hence, Lewis claimed, a convention exists where there is a regularity for which it is common knowledge that
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Truth and Meaning everyone else's conformity gives each person a good and of the functional role of such states, and many will reason for conforming themselves. It turns out to fol- add that mental representation requires a 'language of low from this that, where a system of signals is thought'—a system of physical structures in the subemployed as a conventional means of coordinating ject which somehow matches the content of the subsignals and beliefs, those who produce the signals ject's thoughts (Fodor 1987). However, it is not yet satisfy Grice's conditions for speaker-meaning; so the possible to present any consensus on these issues, and thesis that sentence s means that p just where there is to that extent philosophical debates concerning meana convention that s is used to signal that p is a natural ing remain inconclusive. Nonetheless, the importance development of Grice's proposal. It does not follow of the debate shows that an adequate understanding of from this, however, that human language is a system the concept of meaning is of absolutely fundamental of Lewis-type conventions; and, indeed, the thesis that importance not only for theorizing about language it is has been criticized by Davidson on the grounds but also for an understanding of human beings and that human uses of language are too varied and trivial their place in nature. to meet Lewis's requirements. But Lewis allows that basic communicative conventions can be qualified by See also: Convention; Holism; Indeterminacy of higher-order conventions that permit violations of the Translation; Radical Interpretation. original convention, so Davidson's point is not fatal. Yet, more needs to be said, in response to the above Bibliography question of what is required in supposing that con- Bennett J 1976 Linguistic Behaviour. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge ditions (a-d) are satisfied, as to how a radical Blackburn S W 1984 Spreading the Word: Groundings in the interpreter could verify that native linguistic behavior Philosophy of Language. Clarendon Press, Oxford is conventional. Nonetheless, it does not seem Davidson D 1984 Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. unreasonable to suppose that an infant learning a Oxford University Press, Oxford language is, among other things, being inducted into Dummett M A E 1978 Truth and Other Enigmas. Duckworth, a system of communicative conventions. London The Grice-Lewis account of meaning will only Fodor J 1987 Psychosemantics. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA deliver a reduction of semantics if it is supplemented Frege G 1892 On sense and reference. In: Geach P, Black M (transl.) 1970 Translations from the Philosophical Writings by an account of the nature of psychological states of Gottlob Frege. Basil Blackwell, Oxford (such as the Gricean conditions (a-d)) which does not draw on semantic facts. There are two approaches to Frege G 1918 The thought: A logical inquiry. In: Strawson P (ed.) 1967 Philosophical Logic. Oxford University Press, this: one aims to articulate and justify a physicalist Oxford theory which can be applied directly to all relevant Grice H P 1957 Meaning. Philosophical Review 66: 377-88 psychological states; the other allows that soph- Kripke S A 1982 Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. isticated beliefs and intentions presuppose semantic Basil Blackwell, Oxford facts, but aims to provide a noncircular developmental Lewis D 1969 Convention. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA account (both for the species and the individual) based on a physicalist account of simple beliefs and inten- Locke J 1698 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Nidditch P (ed.) 1975, Clarendon Press, Oxford tions. Even this latter enterprise is contentious, although, unreflectively, people seem content to Peacocke C 1986 Thoughts: An Essay on Content. Basil Blackwell, ascribe quite complex beliefs and intentions to higher Quine W V O Oxford and Object. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1960 Word mammals without reference to language. But issues MA here remain cloudy because of difficulties in finding Wittgenstein L 1934 Blue book. In: Rhees R (ed.) 1958 The satisfactory accounts of the content of even simple Blue and Brown Books. Basil Blackwell, Oxford psychological states. Most theorists favor an Wittgenstein L 1953 Philosophical Investigations. Basil Blackwell, Oxford approach which takes account both of the causation

Meaning Postulate
T. M. V. Janssen

Meaning postulates provide a method used in modeltheoretic semantics to restrict the possible interpretations of an object language L by describing lexical
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meanings in terms of analytically true sentences in L. The method was formulated by Carnap (1947: 22229) and is called for as lexical meanings tend to escape

Metaphor the powers of logical analysis. By applying the method of meaning postulates one is able to regiment lexical meanings to a much greater extent in terms of logical analysis and model theoretic interpretation. A model is constructed from basic sets using standard constructions such as powerset formation. In the interpretation of a language L the basic elements of L are assigned an extension for each possible world and each moment of time. In some cases, in particular for logical elements, this interpretation is very specific and easily definable for all possible worlds and moments of time. For example, the negation sign of logic is interpreted as a function from truth-values to truthvalues assigning true to false and false to true. In other cases, however, the interpretation remains less specific. If L contains the English predicate 'walk,' for example, the predicate will be assigned a set of individuals for each possible world and each moment of time, but the interpretation is unable to specify the individuals that may be said to walk in each case. The reason for this difference is, in Carnap's words (1947: 222), that 'the truth of some statements is logical, necessary, based upon meaning, while that of other statements is empirical, contingent, dependent upon the facts of the world.' By introducing meaning postulates one is able to make certain contingent truths dependent on others, thus restricting the total number of possible interpretations for the language L as a whole. Meaning postulates are statements (postulates) formulated in the object language L, the language under interpretation. These statements must be analytically true, i.e., true in virtue of meaning, in all models considered. One may, if one wishes, subdivide meaning postulates into a number of distinct classes. For example, predicates denoting binary relations may be said to be reflexive, symmetrical, transitive, irreflexive, etc., as the case may be (Carnap 1947: 226-28). The predicate W (warmer than), for example, may be said to be transitive and irreflexive (and hence asymmetrical) by stipulating that:
if' W(a., /?)' and ' W($, y),' then ' W(a, y)' (where a, ft, and y are names for individuals) (la)

Or one can define one predicate's meaning in terms of the meanings of other predicates, as in:
if 'seek(a, /?)' then 'try(a, find(a, /?)),' and vice versa (2)

Or entailment relations, such as equivalence, can be expressed for combinations of individual predicates:
if 'necessarily(always (0))' then 'always(necessarily($)),' and vice versa (where <j> is a sentence) (3)

Likewise, entailment relations with respect to one or more terms can be expressed, as in:
if 'cause(a, (f>)' then '<£' (4)

If one wishes to be strict, one may consider the possibility of formulating a meaning postulate as a criterion of formal adequacy for dictionary definitions. See also: Analyticity; Montague Grammar; Possible Worlds.
Bibliography Carnap R 1947 Meaning and Necessity. A Study in Semantics and Modal Logic, 2nd edn. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL Gamut L T F 1991 Logic, Language and Meaning. Vol. II: Intensional Logic and Logical Grammar. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL

Metaphor
E. Steinhart and E. F. Kittay

Metaphor, a trope in which one thing is spoken of as if it were some other thing, is a ubiquitous feature of natural language. While the ability to understand metaphors and use them is characteristic of mature linguistic competence, the ability to use metaphors well was considered by Aristotle a 'mark of genius' and remains today a feature of intelligence tests and assessments of creativity. In literature, in professional discourses (e.g., theology, philosophy, and law), in scientific language, and in daily discourse, metaphors provide expression for experiences and concepts for

which literal language seems insufficient, thereby increasing the range of articulation possible within the language. What is called a 'metaphor' spans the fresh and startling use of language (illustrated by Melville's metaphor '[He] slept off the fumes of vanity'), the frequently used and barely noticed conventional metaphors, (exemplified in using terms of light to refer to knowledge e.g., 'I see'), and the entirely familiar, even 'dead metaphor' (employed, for instance, by the aquatic term 'current' used to speak of electricity). Whether
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occupied with metaphors novel or commonplace, theorists of language and of cognition have come to recognize that no understanding of language and linguistic capacities is complete without an adequate account of metaphor. Studied in many disciplines and from many perspectives, metaphors, as seen by linguists and other students of language, are primarily linguistic utterances, produced by speakers and processed by listeners. In analyzing metaphors as linguistic phenomena, investigators want to understand the structure of metaphorical utterances, the features that distinguish them from both literal utterances and other figurative speech, and their truth and meaning; they study how metaphors are used in communication insofar as what is intended to be understood is different than what is literally said; and they try to answer why people so often resort to metaphor to communicate and stretch the cognitive and expressive capacities of language. 1. Theories of Metaphor 1.1 Historical Background to Contemporary Theories The first systematic treatment is found in the Poetics, where Aristotle asserts that a metaphor 'is the application to something of a name belonging to something else, either from the genus to the species, or from the species to the genus, or from a species to another species, or according to analogy.' In the Rhetoric, Aristotle articulates the Elliptical Simile theory of metaphor, in which a metaphor is taken as being a comparison abbreviated by dropping the word 'like.' The metaphor 'Man is a wolf,' for example, would be an ellipsis derived from the comparison 'Man is like a wolf.' Aristotle's treatment of metaphor, dominant until very recently, set the tone for Classical and Renaissance texts. The view that metaphor was a decorative use of language prevailed first amongst the proponents of metaphor's virtues and later amongst its detractors. According to Cicero, metaphor first arises from the limitations of the impoverished vocabulary of a new language. But as a language matures and acquires an enhanced vocabulary, metaphor enriches a language by providing its speakers with more dignified and delightful ways of expressing themselves. The rhetorical force that so charmed and impressed Cicero, however, was the same characteristic which dismayed thinkers from Locke to Bachelard. The decorative was for these writers a mere distraction which, in Bachelard's phrase, 'seduces the Reason.' The creative feature of metaphor stirred the interest of the Romantics, from Rousseau to Coleridge and Croce, and of Nietzsche, whose perspectivalism was especially compatible with giving metaphor pride of place. For these theorists, metaphor was thought to be not something added on and dispensible, but generative, even originative of linguistic meaning.
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The twentieth century has witnessed an explosion of theories of metaphor. I. A. Richards (1936), a scholar of Coleridge, raises the Romantic interest in metaphor to a new level of rigor. First he introduces the idea that metaphor is composed of two components which he calls 'vehicle' and 'tenor.' The vehicle of the metaphor (now also called the 'source,' or 'base') is the idea conveyed by the literal meaning of the words used metaphorically. The tenor (now called 'topic' or 'target') is the idea conveyed by the metaphor. In the metaphor 'a seed of hope' the vehicle is 'the seed'; the tenor is hope. Second, Richard contends, a metaphor not only consists of the words used, but is a 'transaction between the contexts' provided by both vehicle and tenor. Max Black (1962), building on Richard's work, insists that a metaphor is not an isolated word. Veering away from the rhetorical view of metaphor as novel name, Black takes metaphor as a predication whose expression is a sentence: metaphors do not just rename an entity, they make a statement. This shift brings metaphor into the purview of cognitively significant discourse. In contrast to both Substitution theories (wherein metaphors are decorative substitutes for mundane terms where a heightened rhetorical or aesthetic effect is desired, but without cognitive import) and Comparison theories (which are associated with the elliptical simile theory attributed to Aristotle, according to which metaphors are implicit comparisons that can generally be made explicit through a simile, again with no cognitive gain), Black proposes an Interaction theory, stressing the conceptual role of metaphor. Metaphor's cognitive contribution to language and thought results from an interaction of 'the Principal Subject,' (roughly Richard's tenor) and 'the Subsidiary Subject' along with its system of associated commonplaces (roughly Richard's vehicle). In 'Man is a wolf,' the system of associations of the subsidiary subject, 'wolf (e.g., a wolf is fierce, is brutally competitive, and so on) is used as a 'lens' or 'filter' through which the principal subject 'man' is understood. The wolf-system highlights implications shared by the commonplaces (which need not by true, only commonly believed) of the subjects (such as ferocity), and downplays implications not shared (such as wolves' den habitation), thereby reshaping our understanding of man, and even of wolves. Nelson Goodman (1968) underscored the systematicity of metaphor. Attention to metaphor by such rigorous students of language as Black and Goodman expanded the interest in metaphor from literary theory and rhetoric to philosophy of language and scientific investigation of natural language. 1.2 The Legacy of and Reaction against Interaction Theories Among those who have exploited the potential of the Interaction theories have been philosophers of science

Metaphor interested in the role of metaphor in scientific language and theory, and cognitive psychologists interested in building models of mind which account for the role of metaphors in cognition. Mary Hesse (1966) develops the understanding of metaphors as 'systematic analogies' with a strong affinity to scientific models, arguing that they are not only heuristically valuable but are irreducible in explanation and prediction. Dedre Gentner (1982) proposes evaluative procedures by which to determine what makes some metaphors better than others in serving cognitive ends. The Experientialist Theory of Metaphor of Lakoffand Johnson (1981) stresses the systematic coherence of metaphor and its role in grounding the human conceptual system in lived experience. The Semantic Field Theory of Metaphor (Kittay 1987) employs the linguistic tools of semantic field theory to develop the work of Black and Goodman by showing how metaphor transfers the semantic structures and relations from the semantic domain of the source to that of the topic, thus inducing a new structure in the topic field. In reaction to the predominance of interactionistinspired theories, Donald Davidson (1978) and others reconsider the view that metaphors are implicit comparisons. Although these theories have been quite influential amongst philosophers, they have not attracted scholars interested in developing formal approaches to natural language sufficient to the challenges and opportunities provided by computational technologies. Because of the availability and promise of these technologies, metaphor research has become an area of concern for computer scientists and artificial intelligence researchers attempting to enable computers to understand natural language. These researchers have developed theories using the formal tools of contemporary linguistics, such as componential analysis, fuzzy logic, model-theoretic semantics, and semantic networks. A variety of computational approaches both to the generation and comprehension of metaphor are now available (Indurkhya 1986; Chandler 1991).
2. Figurative Language, Literal Truth, and Metaphor

ticular trope, it is to be contrasted with other tropes such as irony, hyperbole, metonymy, and synecdoche. Metaphors are characteristically identifiable by the form of the semantic and pragmatic violation. 2.1 Semantic Deviance An utterance may fail to be literally true either because it is empirically false or because it cannot be assigned any literal truth-value. An utterance cannot be assigned any literal truth-value if the terms to which its predicates are applied fail to satisfy 'selectional restriction' conditions—rules restricting the categories to which the predicate can be literally applied. For instance, the predicate 'drinks' requires something animate in the thematic role, 'agent,' and something liquid in the role, 'patient.' Sentences employing synecdoche, metonymy, and often metaphor fail to be literally true because they contain predications violating selectional restrictions. While the violation of selection restriction is often a mark of these types of figuration, synecdoche and metonymy violate these conditions differently than does metaphor. Consider the synecdoche 'A hundred feet marched up the hill.' Although one can say that it is feet that march, it is more accurate to say that one marches with feet. That is, the selection restriction rules on 'march' call for the restriction [human] on the agent role, and for [means of mobility] on the thematic role of instrument. 'Feet' should occupy the thematic role of instrument; instead it occupies the thematic role of agent. While it is not literally correct to speak of feet marching, however, 'feet' are not conceptually unrelated to 'march.' This sort of deviance is also characteristic of metonymy, but different from what occurs in the case of metaphor. In the metonymic sentence, The White House issued a statement affirming the right of gays and lesbians to serve in the military,' the predicate 'issues a statement' has [human] as a selection restriction on the agent role. 'The White House,' however, is where the statement is issued and so fills the thematic role of location. In the case of metaphors, however, the violation of selection restrictions results from the importation of a term from a distant semantic domain, rather than the term's deviant occupation of a particular thematic role. For instance, Socrates explains the distress of his student, Theaetetus, by declaring that the young man is 'giving birth to an idea.' The difficulty in giving 'Theaetetus is giving birth,' a literal reading is because the procreative domain encompassing the activity of giving birth is not appropriately inclusive of human males. It is not because 'Theaetetus' occupies an inappropriate thematic role, agent; Theaetetus is the agent under consideration. 2.2 Pragmatic Constraints Philosopher H. P. Grice provides a 'logic of conversation' consisting of maxims obeyed by speakers

An adequate theory for the identification of metaphors must first distinguish figurative from literal language, then distinguish metaphors from other figures. Figurative utterances somehow breach the norms of literal language and yet are understood as meaningful utterances. Rules governing literal language include syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic constraints. Figurative utterances generally obey syntactic rules, sometimes flout semantic rules, and most often violate pragmatic constraints. The flouting of these rules results in sentences which are either obviously not true or are clearly inappropriate if understood literally. Since metaphor, although occasionally identified with figurative language in general, is more precisely a par-

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adhering to a Cooperative Principle of Conversation, the principle by which the intention to engage in meaningful conversation is indicated. He suggests that when a maxim is flouted and yet the speaker appears to otherwise adhere to the cooperative principle, then one must ask what is implicated by the utterance. Such implicature has been taken as a condition for figurative language. Figures such as irony, hyperbole, synecdoche, metonymy, and metaphor in general violate the conversational maxim of Quality: Try to make your contribution one that is true.' Metaphors, when true, typically violate the conversational maxim of Relevance. Mao was reputed to have said 'A revolution is not a dinner party.' Such violations of conversational maxims cause the listener to attempt a figurative interpretation. The way in which a listener will bring the obviously false or inappropriate sentence into conformity with the Co-operative Principle will be determined by the nature of the figurative language used. An ironical sentence, for example, fails to be true because it states the contrary of what the speaker takes to be true, and so the listener will reverse the sense of the predication. When a metaphorical sentence fails to be true, the listener will seek an interpretation of those parts of the sentence or the utterance which are conceptually incongruous in the context of the discourse. 2.3 Metaphor and Conceptual Incongruity The claim that metaphors are false when read literally has been stressed by Beardsley's Controversion Theory of Metaphor. The violation of selectional restrictions by metaphors is the source of the incongruity emphasized by the Semantic Deviance Theory of metaphor. Joseph Stern (1985) and others have pointed out that the semantic deviance theory fails to be an adequate account of metaphor since some metaphorical sentences violate no selection restrictions: Mao's statement, and idioms such as 'He's up against the wall' may be both literally and figuratively true. Stern adopts the view that metaphors are a sort of demonstrative, which he dubs 'M-that' on analogy with philosopher David Kaplan's treatment of the demonstrative 'D-that.' On Stern's account, metaphors are ways of pointing ('metaphorically that') to some referent and at the same time 'characterizing' the referent in terms of the semantic content of the metaphorically used term. On this account, appeal to the semantic deviance of a metaphor is unnecessary. Others have argued that even where there is no falsity or semantic deviance in the sentence containing the metaphorically used terms, metaphors depend on a conceptual incongruity which is evident, if not within the metaphorical sentence, then between the sentence and a larger discursive context. They have argued that this conceptual incongruity is essential for the conceptual inventiveness of metaphors, an inventiveness that is part of their cognitive effectiveness. It
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is the conceptual incongruity characterized by speaking of one thing in terms of another that is an important differentia between metaphor and other figurative speech. 3. Interpretation of Metaphor 3.1 Meaning of Metaphors Two opposing positions have been staked out concerning the interpretation of metaphoric utterances. The first holds that metaphoric utterances have one and only one meaning, the literal meaning. The second view maintains that there is in addition to the literal meaning, a meaning distinctive to the metaphor and which is the outcome of an interpretive process unique to metaphors. According to the first position, the interpretation of metaphor is a matter of pragmatics. In this school of thought, the older convictions held that metaphors are, at best, decorative, and at worst, the vehicles by which we 'insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment' (Locke, An Essay on Human Understanding, Bk 3: ch. 10). More recently writers have acknowledged the importance of metaphor for cognitive concerns, but have argued that the cognitive contribution is made not by virtue of an unparaphraseable metaphorical meaning but because metaphors play a causal role in some other cognitive activity. Davidson (1978), the chief proponent of this position, writes that metaphors 'intimate similarities' and so cause the speaker to make the comparison that the metaphor intimates. A related causal contribution is to create an intimacy between the speaker and hearer that joins them in the search for similarity (Cohen 1978; Cooper 1986). Black took it to be a feature of the interaction theory that when a metaphor is interpreted, it is given a distinct unparaphraseable meaning. The interaction of the two subjects of the metaphor renders an irreducible cognitive meaning. A number of more recent writings have suggested that the interpretation of a metaphor proceeds by a function applied to the literal meaning of the constituent terms and so yields a distinct metaphoric meaning. Proposals include a possible world or game theoretic analysis (Bergman 1982; Hintikka and Sandu 1990), a mapping of a sentence meaning to a speaker meaning (Searle 1979), and an analogical mapping from the domain of the vehicle to that of the topic (Gentner 1983; Kittay 1987). 3.2 Paraphrasing Metaphor The task of interpreting metaphors has sometimes been taken to mean providing the metaphor with a paraphrase. The most troubling question concerning the assignment of a paraphrase is whether or not it is possible to supply an 'exact literal' paraphrase for each metaphor, or whether any literal paraphrase is at best only approximate. On the one hand, it has been argued that no literal utterance or set of literal

Metaphor utterances can fully capture the meaning of a metaphor, and that, furthermore, the paraphrases that seem most natural are often metaphorical themselves. For instance, although Theaetetus gives birth to an idea' approximately metaphorically means that Theaetetus painfully expresses an idea, the paraphrase means that neither exactly, nor exhaustively, nor entirely literally (since express may be thought a metaphorical predication as well). In this regard it is sometimes suggested that the metaphorical meaning of a metaphor is another metaphor, or set of metaphors. For instance, 'Juliet is the sun' metaphorically means that Romeo's world revolves around Juliet. The thesis of Lakoffand his associates is that certain metaphors belong to the basic conceptual schemes by which understanding of the world is organized and which guide action, and so admit of no literal paraphrase. These conceptual metaphors generate the large number of the metaphors found in ordinary language, metaphors such as 'Life is a journey,' 'Up is good,' 'Anger is heat,' The mind is a container,' and so forth. A metaphorical sentence such as 'She lost her cool' is interpreted as easily and as quickly as it is because it is generated from a basic conceptual understanding of anger as heat and the mind as a container, a conceptual understanding shared by speaker and hearer. 3.3 Rules for Interpreting Metaphors Along with the question of whether interpreting metaphors is a matter of providing a distinctive meaning which is not a literal paraphrase, comes the question of whether such interpretation is rule-governed. Those who maintain that there is no metaphoric meaning generally hold that there are no rules for providing the metaphorical interpretation—that the interpretation depends on an intuitive grasp of the contextual factors, along with a general ability to make similarity judgments. Those who propound the view that metaphors have meaning look for the rules by which such meaning may be derived from the utterance (and sometimes its context). Most metaphor theorists, especially those working on formal or computational models of metaphor, have opted for the second claim and have sought to provide such rules. The debate that ensues amongst these rulebased theories is whether an interpretation requires a one-stage or a two-stage process. One-stage theorists maintain some version of the claim that the metaphorical is essentially continuous with the literal, a case of a polysemy where the metaphorical meanings are the furthest removed from the term's prototypical meaning. Two-stage theories assume that metaphorical meaning is some function of the literal meaning, and that there is some discontinuity between the literal and the metaphorical. Metaphorical interpretation can follow one of several routes: (a) According to the Elliptical Simile Theory and most, but not all Comparison Theories, 'S is P' metaphorically means S is like P. (Some comparison theories deny the existence of metaphorical meaning as such.) Some have argued that such interpretations are ill-suited to other grammatical forms of metaphor (Tirrell 1991). (b) According to the Abstraction Theory, metaphorical meaning is obtained by raising metaphorical predicates to a more abstract level at which there is no semantic incongruity. Feature Transfer Theories (Levin 1977) adopt this strategy. Thus 'Theaetetus gave birth to an idea' metaphorically means that Theaetetus produced an idea, since 'produced' is an abstract version of 'gave birth' that is not semantically incongruous. (c) According to Analogy Theory, offshoots of an interactionist view of metaphor, 'S is P' metaphorically means S is analogous to P. Interpreting metaphors requires specifying analogous domains and the homomorphisms between the domains. One advantage of this theory is that it is best suited to capture the ways in which metaphors are extended, that is, how terms are used from the semantic domain of the vehicle to elaborate aspects of the topic. The Analogy Theory is the favored approach by those searching for computationally tractable theories of metaphor. See also: Metaphor in Literature. Bibliography
Bergman M 1982 Metaphorical assertions. Philosophical Review 91: 229-45 Black M 1962 Metaphor. In: Black M (ed.) Models and Metaphors. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY Brooke-Rose C 1970 A Grammar of Metaphor. Seeker and Warburg, London Chandler S R 1991 Metaphor comprehension: A connectionist approach to implications for the mental lexicon. Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 6: 227-58 Cohen T 1978 Metaphor and the cultivation of intimacy. Critical Inquiry 5: 3-12 Cooper D 1986 Metaphor. Blackwell, Oxford Davidson D 1978 What metaphors mean. In: Sacks S (ed.) On Metaphor. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL Gentner D 1982 Are scientific analogies metaphors? In: Miall D S (ed.) Metaphor: Problems and Perspectives. Humanities Press, New York Gentner D 1983 Structure-mapping: A theoretical framework for analogy. Cognitive Science 1: 155-70 Goodman N 1968 Languages of Art. Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, IN Hesse M 1966 Models and Analogies in Science. Sheed and Ward, London Hintikka J, Sandu G 1990 Metaphor and the varieties of lexical meaning. Dialectica 44: 57-78 Indurkhya B 1986 Constrained semantic transference: A formal theory of metaphors. Synthese 68: 445-80

Metaphor (from the ancient Greek verb metapherein, mean, however, as is often assumed, that it is treated to 'carry over, transfer') means 'to speak about X in as a simple ornament. Most rhetorics of the ancient world contain an terms of Y'—e.g., 'The moon is a sickle.' Aristotle (384-322 BC) defines it in his Poetics (ca. 339 BC) thus: account of metaphor which places it firmly as a figure of speech (trope, paradigmatic) rather than a figure of Metaphor consists in applying to a thing a word that thought (schema, syntagmatic). The strongest version belongs to something else; the transference being either from genus to species or from species to genus or from of this distinction is Quintilian's in the Institutio Oratorio (ca. 75 AD) but he derives it from Greek sources. species to species or on grounds of analogy. (1965:61) However, most rhetorical treatises are written not about poetry and poetics, but about speaking and Aristotle's distinction between 'simple replacement' prose writing. They are a set of written instructions, and 'analogy' governs, effectively, the difference to train the reader in the art of persuasion, either between simple and complex 'metaphor.' Discussion forensically—as was first the case with Corax of Syrof metaphor varies along an axis of assumptions about acuse (467 AD)—or epideictically (decoratively, pubwhat Aristotle terms here 'analogy' as to whether it is licly in a more general sense than simply advocacy). conceived of as including the mental act of perceiving Aristotle's is the only Poetics surviving from the analogy—the idea-content—or whether it is a strictly ancient world, even including Longinus' treatise On and exclusively linguistic operation—the language The Sublime of the second century AD, which is a level. Writers vary significantly, but most—though general rhetorical manual. It is characteristic of this certainly not all—lie between these two extremes. split between the genres that Aristotle should separate Thus puzzles about metaphor may, at the one end of his remarks about poetry from his other discussion of the scale, raise problems in psychology and phil- metaphor in the Rhetoric (337 BC). Thus the use of osophy and, at the other, problems in the study of metaphor in poetry and in prose is formally separated, language. In between these extremes lie the problems though it is noticeable that Aristotle and Quintilian the subject raises for literary criticism, both traditional both choose their examples of metaphor from and modern. Metaphor is also an index of the power poetry—the former from Hesiod, Homer, and the relations between literary genres and what is said dramatists, and the latter from Virgil and Ovid. about metaphor often indicates what the assumptions The development from fifth-century Greece to of a period or a critic are about these matters: what Augustan Rome seems to be that of a progressive is sayable microcosmically about metaphor is often pragmatism. Aristotle always takes an empirical sayable macrocosmically about literature. approach, but he believes rhetoric to be an art of the possible whereas for Quintilian it is a set of exercises 1. The Classical View: Aristotle to commit to memory. For Aristotle in the Rhetoric, Metaphor is treated by Classical writers as a desirable metaphor is a part of the larger topic of the enthyrhetorical means, not an end in itself. This does not meme (from Greek en themon 'in the mind'), a kind
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Metaphor in Literature of rhetorical syllogism, looser than the strictly logical forms but vital to the art of manipulating the 'probable.' For both of them, metaphor gives energeia which means 'force, vigor,' or, as the Loeb edition interestingly translates it, 'actuality.' But Aristotle makes an important distinction between metaphor and simile:
For the simile, as we have said, is a metaphor differing only by the addition of a word, wherefore it is less pleasant because it is longer, it does not say this is that, so that the mind does not even examine this. [Author's italics]

It follows that the characteristic compression and enigma of metaphor makes the mind of the beholder entertain something not immediately understandable and thus 'a kind of knowledge (oion mathesis) results.' Metaphor, says Aristotle, is proportionate or analogical (kat 'analogical), and sets things 'before the eyes.' But he insists that the analogy should be between things that are unlike or resistant to an extent, 'just as, for instance, in philosophy it needs sagacity to grasp the similarity in things that are apart...' And he goes on to link this energeia to the defeat of expectations:
Most smart sayings are derived from metaphor, and also from misleading the hearer beforehand. For it becomes evident to him that he has learnt something, when the conclusion turns out contrary to his expectation, and the mind seems to say, 'How true it is! but I missed it.'

of language in which Socrates mounts a critique of representation—the names for abstractions like 'truth' and 'necessity' are broken down into their earlier elements which point (figuratively) towards the 'true' elements (by metaphor) of our current speech, which we have forgotten—hence the word for 'truth,' for example, i.e., aletheia, 'really' means 'a divine wandering' because it is made up of the elements ale and theia, or necessity means 'walking through a ravine' because 'necessary' (anangkaion) is made up of an angke ion meaning literally 'going through a ravine.' In this way, argues Socrates, perhaps abstract language itself—and therefore the very language of definition—contains hidden figuration and is an extended metaphor whose origins perpetually threaten its ability to represent abstractly. However, metaphor reveals the traces of its divine origin, for 'speech' says Socrates, punning on the Greek words for 'they speak' and 'everything' (pan), 'signifies all things':
Socrates You are aware that speech signifies all things (pan) and is always turning them round and round, and has two forms, true and false. Hermogenes Certainly. Socrates Is not the truth that is in him the smooth or sacred form which dwells above among the Gods, whereas falsehood dwells among men below, and is rough like the goat of tragedy, for tales and falsehoods have generally to do with the tragic or goatish life, and tragedy is the place of them? Hermogenes Very true. Socrates Then surely, Pan, who is the declarer of all things (pan) and the perpetual mover (aei polon) of all things, is rightly called aipolos (goatherd), he being the two-formed son of Hermes, smooth in his upper part, and rough and goat-like in his lower regions. And, as the son of Hermes, he is speech or the brother of speech, and that brother should be like brother is no marvel.

Metaphors are like jokes and philosophical paradoxes. This is not an assimilation of metaphor to simile, nor is it a simple view of metaphor as comparison. Aristotle's more famous structural insistence in the Poetics on the analogical proportion idea in metaphor—B is to A as D is to C—needs to be put in the context of the above remarks because they show that analogy has plenty of room to include the idea of implicit meaning (the distance of the elements one from another and the suppressed aspects of analogy) and is a source of wit, or a contrast between appearance and reality. This is a more mentalistic view of metaphor than the Roman Quintilian's recipe-book approach to the store of ornamental figures.

Language is portrayed, metaphorically, as a satyr: through a grasp of its perpetually dual form—i.e., analogy—one can get glimpses of the truth it can offer. The other view playfully expressed here is that language is perpetually unstable, untrustworthy, and quite unsatisfactory for reasoning with, because it can never identify absolutely with what it seeks to picture and therefore can only be, at best, an approximation 2. The Platonic Tradition: Metaphor and the to an inner truth. Skepticism about representation in Paradox of Representation language is thus inseparable from a self-consciousness Plato (429-347 BC) does not have a View' of metaphor about the figurative. But Plato, the enemy of poets in stated in any one place like Aristotle. Nevertheless his the Republic, gives the grounds here for a profound dialogues abound in examples and ideas about the defense of metaphor as a positive instrument of significance of metaphor and figurative language thought. Later, in the Medieval and Renaissance periods, which—deeply ambiguous as they are—have proved enormously influential, especially on the practice of Nature becomes a book written by God, and, in a poetry. There are two lines of thought in Plato, both of common extension of the metaphor, language is again which are sometimes found within the same dialogue. thought of as a repository of hidden analogies and One is that all language originates in metaphor and correspondences which form—to use the usual subfiguration. The Cratylus, for example, represents an or associated metaphor—the signatures or traces of often playful and obscure enquiry into the origins God's presence. This view also uses the technique
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Truth and Meaning of 'poetic etymology' which purports to uncover the original metaphors of language itself. So Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86), who claimed in his Apologie For Poetrie (1595) that only the poets can recreate the 'golden world,' is borrowing the technique of Socrates in the Cratylus. This self-conscious view of the conceptual paradox posed by metaphor in representation was systematized by one continental eighteenth-century philosopher. One can see the Platonist influence in the The New Science (1725) of the Italian protostructuralist thinker, Vico (1668-1744)—particularly in the important place given to metaphor in Vico's inquiries into the origin of languages. Vico proposes a universal fourfold development for every national culture; and to every phase he gives a rhetorical master trope, beginning with the original of all perception: 'metaphor.' Then follow 'metonymy,' 'synecdoche,' 'irony.' Language originates in metaphor in this tradition; and culture, in epic.
3. Empiricism

directly at the expense of Locke's association of ideas principle, obeying it and yet triumphantly violating it at the same moment:
—My young Master in London is dead! said Obadiah. —A green satin night-gown of my mother's, which had been twice scoured, was the first idea which Obadiah's exclamation brought into Susannah's head.—Well might Locke write a chapter upon the imperfections of words.— —Then, quoth Susannah, we must all go into mourning—But note a second time: the word mourning notwithstanding Susannah made use of it herself—failed also of doing its office; it excited not one single idea, tinged either with grey or black,—all was green,—The green satin night-gown hung there still. [Author's italics]

In the latter half of the seventeenth century, a new hostility to metaphor emerged. The English empiricist Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) in his treatise Leviathan (1651), classified metaphor as an 'abuse of speech': '... when they [men] use words metaphorically; that is, in other sense than they are ordained for; and thereby deceive others' (1651: 102). Hobbes conceives of language as a kind of 'naming' and the problem he seeks, as a result, to solve is the problem of'inconstant signification':
For one man calleth Wisdome, what another calleth feare; and one cruelty, what another justice; one gravity, what another stupidity, etc... And therefore such names can never be true grounds of any ratiocination. No more can metaphors, and tropes of speech: but these are less dangerous, because they profess their inconstancy; which the other do not.

This passage is a perfect illustration of Locke's theory that thought and language are ruled by the association of ideas, except that the association is not the conventional one between mourning and black which it should universally be, according to Locke, but a private one, based on a combination of desire and habit which is so dominant that Susannah's mind is transformed, comically, by metaphor, into a wardrobe. The separation, vital for Locke's whole theory, between the idea in the mind and the thing being thought of, is eroded. It is Sterne's metaphor 'hung there' which creates this satirical refutation: this metaphor will not unpack properly into idea and thing, and therefore is not replaceable by a 'concrete,' 'simple,' or 'literal' paraphrase without loss of significance.
4. Neoclassicism

Here one sees graphically the decline of rhetoric: Hobbes has a profound distrust of metaphor, but his 'realism' contradicts what Aristotle has to say by suggesting that metaphor always declares itself as deceptive. This view initiated the cult of the plain style. Later, John Locke (1632-1704), in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), also tackled the problem of the 'unsteady uses of words.' He regards language as a process of labeling, and the 'reform of language'—i.e., the precedence of the 'literal' over all figuration is explicitly a part of the age's antirhetorical project. Like the Puritan side of Plato, Locke is deeply suspicious of abstractions but also equally so of metaphor and simile. Metaphor is thus not distinguished from any other form of figuration—all of which for Locke are ruled by one prior law; the association of ideas. The satire of Laurence Sterne (1713-68) in Tristram Shandy (1760-67) employs metaphor
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'As to metaphorical expression,' said Samuel Johnson (1709-84), 'that is a great excellence in style, when it is used with propriety, for it gives you two ideas for one.' Neoclassical attitudes to metaphor are founded on the linguistic pragmatism of the Roman, as opposed to the psychological subtlety of the Greek writers. Horace's (65-8 BC) highly pragmatic update of parts of Aristotle's thinking in the Ars Poetica (ca. 17BC) is mainly concerned with such things as appropriateness, decorum, and consistency: significantly, it does not mention metaphor. An example of what Johnson means is in his famous emendation of the speech of Shakespeare's Macbeth at v, iii, 27-8; 'My way of life/Is fall'n into the sere, the yellow Leafe,' which Johnson amended to 'My May of Life' on the grounds of metaphorical propriety. The result, which reveals the prejudices of the age, is a rococo prettification, in the name of consistency, of something that strikes the ear as massive and rugged. It is likely that Shakespeare felt 'way of life' to be a metaphorical expression, but if Johnson thought of it as a metaphor at all, then it was an inconsistent one which made the whole line metaphorically mixed. He reconstructed the phrase on the assumption of a compositor's error, thus restoring the

Metaphor in Literature stylistic consistency which he felt that Shakespeare would not have missed. It is from this strain of thought that the familiar idea of the inappropriateness of mixed metaphor, which survived until the Edwardian period in manuals of composition, is derived.
5. The Romantic View

elements, in order to apprehend fully Shelley's notion of the entirely conceptual nature of Plato's art.
6. Post-Romantic Views

In the Romantic period, poetry gained a new ascendancy as the paradigm of literature itself. The Romantics, reacting against the rhetoric of Augustan Rome and reaching back to Aristotle and Plato, as Vico had done, gave an enormous impetus to metaphor as the dynamic founding trope of poetry and literary culture. Two views are to be distinguished here, which ultimately influence the modern tradition in different ways; the Organicism of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) and the Romantic Platonism of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), both of which make equally far-reaching claims for metaphor but by different routes. Metaphor for Coleridge is part of the 'interinanimation of words' and his view is neither that of 'simple replacement' nor 'substitution' nor 'comparison,' but of'organic unity.' In his 'Lectures on Shakespeare' (1808, publ. 1836), Coleridge closely analyzes how metaphors reveal an inexhaustible mutual reactiveness amongst their elements, which creates an unparaphraseable richness of meaning. This approach depends on Coleridge's notion of the 'imagination' as a separate and dynamic faculty. Coleridge's view of metaphor is deeply antiempiricist. A metaphor has the form of a duality but is always surmounted by a unity in the mind of the perceiver. Coleridge's main distinction is to have isolated and stressed this drive towards unity-in-difference in metaphor. Shelley's Defence Of Poetry (1821) again uses the argument from the origins of language, but gives it a new, optimistic twist. Language, it is argued, was in its beginning not a set of atomic labels, of names, as the empiricists would argue, but 'the chaos of a cyclic poem'; and 'In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry...' A defense of poetry amounts to a defense of metaphor, which is the agent by which language produces new meaning. 'Their language [i.e., the poets'] is vitally metaphorical; it marks the before unapprehended relations of things...' Metaphor, for Shelley, is the Ur-perception of analogy and hence the governing trope of language and poetic art. 'Language,' he claims in the Defence, 'is arbitrarily produced by the imagination, and has relation to thoughts alone.' Shelley's poetic practice is ruled by perpetually dispensible analogy, as in his triply metaphorical description of Plato as 'kindling harmony in thoughts divested of shape and action'—a phrase in which the reader is required to shift lightly from music, to fire, to clothing, without pausing or isolating these single

Coleridge's view of 'organic form' has been heavily influential in the modern period, developed, transformed, and hardened into the loose collection of doctrines known as Anglo-American Formalism. This movement is a continuation of the Romantic opposition between Poetry and Science, which crystallizes in the early statements of I. A. Richards (1893-1975). In 'Science and Poetry' (1926), Richards proposed to reduce meaning to two types—the 'emotive' and the 'referential,' in which metaphor belongs to the former not the latter category. There is a residue of 'empiricism' and utilitarianism in the early Richards which he later came to change. The notion that a metaphor is a vital part of language's power to generate new meanings, is an assumption which underlies three or four different movements in poetry and criticism in the modern period, and in this tradition the romantic view of metaphor is preserved but renamed and assimilated into certain related terms, for example, 'image' and 'symbol,' which seem to many writers in this period exclusive features of lyric poetry itself, not of discourse in general, but which can be regarded as reducible to metaphors with one term suppressed, and which no longer display explicitly their analogical character. There is a general movement in both theory and practice towards the autonomy of figurative language. Poetic theory, in Symbolist France and Imagist England up to the 1920s, turns inward. Despite the rise of the novel, the ascendancy of lyric poetry—and the corresponding demand for a theory of the lyric moment in language—is unbroken from the Romantic to the Modern Periods and the modulation from high Romanticism into Symbolism which has been exhaustively documented, yields a high concentration on the autonomy of symbolic—in reality, metaphoric— language as part of the general conception of what Eliot called the 'autotelic' nature of poetic language. This attitude is reified in the obsession with 'imagery' in the Anglo-American criticism of the postwar period, which began in Shakespeare criticism and spread into general critical vocabulary under this rather misleading name, and which later writers, notably P. N. Furbank, in his book Reflections on the Word 'Image' (1970), have again reduced to metaphor. I. A. Richards, however, shifted his viewpoint radically and went on to write one of the most influential modern accounts of how metaphor works based on a significant re-reading of Coleridge, which pushes him much more towards the anti-Empiricist and Platonist tradition—the so-called Interaction theory of metaphor. In his later book The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1930) Richards attacks the empiricist account of metaphor quite explicitly as The Proper Meaning
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Truth and Meaning Superstition' and calls for a new rhetoric which can clarify the confusion inherited from the Lockeian tradition. Richards identifies the confusion as lying in the distinction between the 'metaphorical' and the 'literal' meaning of expressions and demonstrates convincingly that the so-called literal meaning is not equivalent to the meaning of the whole expression. Instead, he invents the terms 'tenor' and 'vehicle' for the two parts of a metaphor—which correspond, in empiricist language, to the 'literal' and the 'figurative' parts—e.g., in the 'moon is a sickle,' the tenor is the 'moon' and the vehicle is the 'sickle'—and he then shows how in complex metaphors the tenor and the vehicle can change places—for example he quotes the Sufi apothegm: 'I am the child whose father is his son and the vine whose wine is its jar' and asks his reader to entertain the deliberate chain of exchanges, designed, for the purposes of spiritual meditation, to defeat a 'literal' paraphrase. Richards' theory is a modified, nonmystical version of the interaction view of metaphor which resists the tautology involved in supposing that there is such a thing as the 'literal meaning' which can replace the 'metaphorical meaning.' A development of this attitude can be found in William Empson's theory of Mutual Comparison elaborated in Some Versions of Pastoral (1936). Another effective analysis of metaphor in this tradition is W. Nowottny's The Language Poets Use (1962). 7. Structuralism The most persuasive and influential Structuralist account of metaphor is contained in Roman Jakobson's classic essay, 'Two Types of Aphasia' (1956). In this essay, Jakobson examines the evidence from the records of the speech of aphasics, and from this evidence he classifies speech defects into two types— failures of vocabulary (lexis, paradigmatic axis of selection) and failures of grammar (syntagmatic axis of combination). From there he goes on to show that both types of patients make substitutions which correspond to metaphor and metonymy. He then maps this point on to the Saussurean binary distinctions between linguistic axes. The two tropes then become, in his classic 'Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics' (1960), the master tropes governing different literary genres, and this can yield a complete definition of what poetry characteristically does. This view of the relations between the tropes explicitly changes again the center of gravity for the literary genres. Metaphor is firmly and explicitly consigned to the paradigmatic axis of discourse and associated with poetry, and opposed in a binary fashion to the trope of metonymy, which becomes syntagmatic, and which generates prose narrative. The account is in some ways reductive—metaphor is a form of substitution of in absentia particles of lexis from the paradigm (selection axis), and there is no way in this account for metaphor
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to enter the syntagm and become a combinative factor. By definition it is held in a certain position by its mutual opposition with metonymy's chain of linear substitutions. In some ways this idea ought to be merely a relativistic instrument of analysis: both poetry and prose narrative may contain both metaphor and metonymy. On the macrolevel, genre and form are generated by the extent to which each text foregrounds metaphor or metonymy: a text which is all metaphor will be a lyric poem and one which is all metonymy will be a realistic novel. (However, Jakobson does suggest that metonymy, not metaphor, is the method of surrealism, which is sometimes conveniently forgotten.) In Jakobson's own critical practice, however, the oppositional method works to minimize the cognitive content of metaphor and yield a formalist analysis of poetry. In general, the structuralist analysis of poetry, compared with its insights into prose narrative, has been disappointing—precisely because of the reductive account of metaphor which its taxonomic grid relies upon. The structuralist account has the advantage of getting rid at a stroke of the old-fashioned and rather Cartesian confusion between 'figures of thought' and 'figures of speech'—metaphors can coexist on the linguistic and the conceptual levels without any problem; but it does not add to the traditional understanding of metaphor (as opposed to metonymy which becomes a more important concept than ever before), except in rearranging its relations with other tropes. However, the very stabilizing of this taxonomic grid itself presents further difficult problems in relation to the concept of metaphor. 8. Poststructuralism Nietzsche's remarks about metaphor in his 1873 essay Vber Wahrheit und Ltige im auflermoralischen Sinn ('On truth and falsity in their ultramoral sense'), form an important reference point for the poststructuralist account of metaphor. Nietzsche argues, in a hostile, but also dependent, parody of Socrates, that we necessarily and often unknowingly use metaphors when we discuss the question of truth, taking them to be the original things themselves:
When we talk about trees, colors, snow, and flowers, we believe we know something about the things themselves, and yet we only possess metaphors of the things, and these metaphors do not in the least correspond to the original essentials.

This is another version of the argument-from-origins, used to attack the worn-out humanist tradition. Nietzsche attacks our confidence in our own representations, arguing that language itself is metaphorical and that when we seek definitions of things, we deceive ourselves unknowingly and take for truths

Metaphor in Literature those things which are merely our own anthropomorphic fictions:
What therefore is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms: in short a sum of human relations which became poetically and rhetorically intensified, metamorphosed, adorned, and after long usage seem to a nation fixed, canonic and binding...

by their source'; but the self-defeating nature of such a tropology is obvious:
If we wanted to conceive and classify all the metaphorical possibilities of philosophy, there would always be at least one metaphor which would be extended and remain outside the system: that one, at least, which was needed to construct the concept of metaphor or,... the metaphor of metaphor.

In a manner reminiscent of the Socrates of the Cratylus, he self-consciously uses the metaphor, for our notions of truth, of coins whose obverses have become effaced, and which have lost their value as a result. Perception of nature can only be, originally, metaphorical but man, argues Nietzsche, 'forgets that the original metaphors of perception are metaphors, and takes them for things themselves.' There are two main areas in which this argument has been influential. First, some of the most eloquent writing about literature in the immediate postwar period takes up this antihumanist posture and attacks anthropomorphic fictions in literary language. This leads to experiments in a new form of writing in the Parisbased group, the Nouveau Roman, led by Alain Robbe-Grillet. Robbe-Grillet's explicit hostility to figurative language, including metaphor in particular, as a literary 'consolation,' is recorded in a number of brilliant essays, of which perhaps the most notable is 'Nature, humanism and tragedy' (1958) which uses the same argument as seen in Nietzsche (i.e., that 'nature knows no forms') to make a plea for a new kind of literature which will not 'take refuge' in tropes. Robbe-Grillet himself experiments in writing which agonizingly prolongs the act of meticulous description without figuration, notably in the opening of his novel Le Voyeur (1958). This posture is echoed in the early critical work of Roland Barthes, particularly in Writing Degree Zero (1953, transl. 1967) which argues for a neutral 'zero' style in prose fiction which rejects the bourgeois compromise of 'style.' Second, explicitly indebted to Nietzsche for its central metaphor of worn-out coins, stands the elaborate discussion of metaphor by Jacques Derrida, 'White mythology' (1974). The basic point which Derrida seeks to demonstrate is that it is impossible to arrive at a 'metaphorology' because metaphor cannot be eradicated from any metalanguage which would stabilize itself as non-metaphorical. This is because the nature of metaphor is such that it leaves its mark upon concepts—in a passage of almost Socratic bravura, Derrida reveals the metaphorical element in the Greek term 'trope' which means 'a turning,' and which is used, as shown above, as a stable instrument of taxonomy, to confine metaphor to a linguistic level only and remove it from the domain of the conceptual. Thus he argues that anything that claimed to be a metalanguage would have to have a meta-metalanguage which would 'lead to classifying metaphors

Thus metaphor is assimilated to aporia and mis-enabyme and made the instrument of an infinite regress at the heart of any empirical effort to separate the defining from the defined. Paradoxically, in the realm of literary criticism, metaphor has once again assumed a position of tremendous power and is cultivated, by the Yale group of poststructuralists who follow Derrida, in particular Paul de Man and Hillis Miller, as a critical instrument for revealing the aporia of largely romantic, lyric poetry. Deconstruction, as it has come to be known, is in practice a secondary wave of Anglo-American formalism, using self-conscious metaphors of infinite regress to draw a charmed circle around literariness, largely in the genre of lyric poetry. Deconstruction— because of its obsession with the 'tropical'—is not a method which can be readily used in the discussion of extended narrative or prose fiction. However, the discussion of metaphor has recently begun to use more representational assumptions. These are even evident in the earlier Derrida of Dissemination (transl. 1972). The tour de force of this volume is the essay called 'Plato's Pharmakon" in which, drawing on the work of J. P. Vernant, he exposes the complexities of hidden metaphor in the Greek text of Plato's Phaedrus, using the technique triumphantly to draw attention to the metaphor used by Socrates, at the climactic point of his exposition, in claiming that truth is 'written upon the soul' and thus ostensibly to defeat his argument that 'writing,' and indeed rhetoric, is logically secondary to the spoken dialectic. The claim that Socrates is contradicting himself rests upon the presence of what Derrida takes to be unacknowledged metaphor in this text. The implication here is that the use of a metaphor for Derrida, is not only conceptual, but also representational: the metaphor can drag along with it, it is implied, the whole of a belief system:
But it is not any less remarkable here that the so-called living discourse should suddenly be described by a 'metaphor' borrowed from the order of the very thing one is trying to exclude from it, the order of its simulacrum. Yet this borrowing is rendered necessary by that which structurally links the intelligible to its copy, and the language describing dialectics cannot fail to call upon it. [Author's italics]

Derrida is using, ironically, against Plato, the Platonic argument of the Cratylus. But: 'that which structurally
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Truth and Meaning links the intelligible to its copy,' is in fact an old argument about metaphors in some sense representing domains of thought, or topoi. However, a more pragmatic version of this representational notion of metaphor, which locates its source in a whole ideological complex of often unconscious beliefs, forms an important part of the more mainstream contemporary analysis of metaphor in discourse. It is consistent, of course, with the Freudian analysis of metaphor as a revelation of unconscious meaning. A version of it is also employed in more eclectic linguistic analyses of discourse such as the influential Metaphors We Live By (1980) by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Political analysis of the racist and feminist bias in much contemporary rhetoric uses this assumption about metaphor—i.e., that it has a mimetic or representational relationship to the subconscious or, more often, unconscious beliefs of a speaker or writer, or a society. The metaphors it uses are symptomatic of the state of a culture. For example, the recent writings of Susan Sontag—e.g., Illness as Metaphor (1978) and AIDS and its Metaphors (1989)—tend to use similar assumptions.
Bibliography Aristotle 1926 (337 BC) (trans. Treece H) The Art of Rhetoric. Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA Aristotle 1965 Poetics. In: Dorsch T R (ed. and trans.) Classical Literary Criticism. Penguin, Harmondsworth Barthes R 1988 The old rhetoric: An aide-memoire. In: Barthes R The Semiotic Adventure. Basil Blackwell, Oxford Booth W C1978 Metaphor as rhetoric. Critical Inquiry 5:4972 Brooke-Rose C 1958 A Grammar of Metaphor. Seeker and Warburg, London Burke K 1941 Four master tropes. Kenyan Review 3:421-38 Derrida J 1972 Johnson B (ed.) Dissemination. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL Derrida J 1974 White mythology: Metaphor in the text of philosophy. New Literary History 6:5-74 Furbank P N 1970 Reflections On The Word 'Image'. Seeker and Warburg, London Hawkes T 1972 Metaphor. Methuen, London Jakobson R 1956 Two types of aphasic disturbance. In: Jakobson R, Halle M 1956 Fundamentals of Language. Mouton, The Hague Jakobson R 1960 Closing statement: Linguistics and poetics. In: Sebeok T A (ed.) Style in Language. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Lakoff G, Johnson M 1980 Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL Lodge D 1970 The Modes of Modern Writing. Edward Arnold, London Nowottny W 1962 The Language Poets Use. Athlone Press, London Ong W J Metaphor and the twinned vision. The Sewanee Review «: 193-201 Quintilian M F 1920-2 (ca. 75 AD) (trans. Butter H E) Institutio Oratorio. Heinemann, London Richards I A 1965 (orig. 1936) The Philosophy of Rhetoric. Oxford University Press, London Ricoeur P 1977 The Rule of Metaphor. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London Shelley P B 1953 (orig. 1821) Brett-Smith (ed.) The Defence of Poetry. Oxford University Press, London Sontag S 1978 Illness as Metaphor. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York Sontag S 1989 AIDS and Its Metaphors. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York Vico G 1984 (orig. 1725) The New Science. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY

Paradoxes, Semantic
R. C. Koons

The semantic paradoxes are a family of arguments or proofs. A 'paradox' or 'antinomy' is an argument in which a contradiction is logically derived from apparently unassailable and fundamental principles. A 'semantic' paradox is a proof of the logical inconsistency of certain laws governing such semantic notions as 'truth,' 'denotation,' or 'definition.' A central task for anyone constructing a semantic theory relying upon any of these notions must be devising some way of averting the semantic paradoxes.
1. History of the Semantic Paradoxes

The oldest of the semantic paradoxes is the so-called 'Paradox of the Liar,' which is attributed to Eubulides
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of the Megaran school (fourth century BC): 'A man says that he is lying. Is what he says true or false?' Extensive medieval study of the problem referred to the paradoxical statement by the apostle Paul in Titus 1: 12. Paul quotes approvingly the statement, by a Cretan poet, that all Cretans are liars. The Sophismata of Jean Buridan (1295-1356) provide the most sophisticated medieval treatment of the problem (see Moody 1953). The development of mathematical logic and the renewal of interest in the philosophy of language led to the re-emergence of semantic paradoxes as objects of study early in the twentieth century. In 1905, Jules Richard (1906) used a Cantorian diagonal argument

Paradoxes, Semantic
to 'define' a real number which is distinct from every 'definable' real number. Berry's paradox (see Russell 1908) used the definition: 'the least integer not nameable in fewer than nineteen syllables,' a definition which itself contains only eighteen syllables. Kurt Grelling created the paradox of heterologicality: he defined a 'heterologicaF predicate as a one-place predicate which is not true of itself (e.g., the predicate 'is long' is heterological, since 'is long' is not long). Grelling then raised the paradoxical problem: is 'is heterological' a heterological predicate? Finally, in 1932, Tarski modified Godel's 1931 proof of the incompleteness theorem (which was itself inspired by Richard's paradox) to create a formal version of Eubulides' Liar Paradox, which Tarski used to prove the undefinability of'truth'. Tarski introduced a schema, called Convention T, which constitutes a necessary condition of adequacy for any purported definition of truth: s is true if and only if s (e.g., an instance of this schema would be: 'snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white). Tarski demonstrated that no language can contain a predicate 'true' which makes every instance of convention T true. He did this by constructing a Liar sentence L which says, in effect, that L is false. Convention T then implies that L is true if and only if L is false. 2. The Semantic Paradoxes as Diagonal Arguments In 1891, Cantor developed an argument known as the diagonal argument. The argument includes a method for constructing, given an infinite list of infinite sequences, an infinite sequence which does not belong to the list. The two-dimensional array which results from arranging the infinite sequences one after the other is examined below. Then the diagonal of this array is looked at, and a sequence is constructed which differs from the diagonal at every step. The resulting sequence will be different from every sequence on the original list, since it will differ with each such sequence at at least one point: the point at which the diagonal crosses the sequence. The relevance of this construction to the semantic paradoxes can be illustrated by means of Grelling's heterological paradox. First, all of the one-place predicates expressible in English are placed in some fixed order. The predicates are then arranged both along the top and the left-hand side of a two-dimensional array. At each point in the array, a T is placed if the predicate of the row is true of the predicate of the column, otherwise an F is inserted. The predicate 'is heterological' can now be defined by reference to the diagonal of the array: if the nth row has a T in the nth column, then the nth predicate is not heterological, so the predicate 'is heterological' gets an F in the nth column. Similarly, if the nth row has an F in the nth column, then 'is heterological' gets a T in the nth column. By Cantor's argument, 'is heterological' cannot appear in the list of predicates, that is, it is not a predicate expressible in English. Yet, this cannot be, since we have in fact so expressed it (see Simmons 1990). 3. Avoiding the Paradoxes in Formal Languages: Type Theory Both Bertrand Russell and Tarski recommended that mathematicians work in a rigidly typed formal language which avoids the semantical paradoxes. Russell called his language the language of 'ramified type theory'. Tarski proposed the distinction between 'object language' and 'meta language'. Alonzo Church (1979) demonstrated that Tarski's distinction is implied by Russell's type theory. According to Tarski, the semantic theory for a language L (the object language) must be carried out in a distinct language L' (the metalanguage). Thus, the predicates 'is a true sentence of V or 'is a heterological predicate of U cannot be expressed in L itself but only in a distinct metalanguage for L. If one wishes to develop a semantic theory for the metalanguage L', one must do this in yet another language L>, the metametalanguage. This series of increasingly powerful languages, each with the capacity for expressing the semantic theories of its predecessors, is known as 'the Tarskian hierarchy'. 4. Semantic Paradox in Natural Language: Soluble or Insoluble? Tarski characterized natural languages as inconsistent, since they plainly violate his principle of the distinctness of object language and metalanguage. According to Tarski, natural languages purport to be universal, to be able to express anything which can be expressed. Tarski believed that the semantic paradoxes demonstrate that no language can in fact be universal. Consequently, formal semantics cannot be carried out in a natural language like English, for if it could, then the semantics for any language (including English itself) could be carried out in English, causing us to run afoul of the semantic paradoxes. Furthermore, no fully satisfactory semantics for English as a whole can be given (in any language), since the semantic rules for words like 'true' or 'definable' implicit in ordinary practice are logically inconsistent. Thus, Tarski held that the semantic paradoxes constitute an insoluble problem for the semantics of natural language. Defenders of this view in the 1980s and 1990s, such as Anil Gupta and Stephen Yablo, study the semantic paradoxes in order to describe mathematically the incoherences and instabilities of natural language, and to diagnose exactly how natural language goes wrong (see Gupta 1982; Yablo 1985). Beginning in the 1970s, a number of proposals have been made to solve the semantic paradoxes in natural languages. According to these proposals, it is possible to consistently assign semantic values of some kind to the sentences of natural language, including instances of paradoxes like the Liar. It is claimed that properly

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Truth and Meaning understood, the semantic rules implicit in ordinary linguistic practice, or very close approximations to these, are coherent and defensible.
5. Contemporary Diagnoses of the Paradoxes as Insoluble

Gupta (1982) has urged that any attempt to assign stable semantic values to paradoxical sentences in natural language be abandoned. He suggests that there is no semantic rule of application associated with the predicate 'is true' in English (no assignment of a set of things of which the predicate is true). Instead, there is only a rule of revision which tells us, given a putative interpretation of 'is true,' how to make marginal improvements. According to Gupta, the interpretation of 'is true' oscillates as more and more improvements are made, until a stabilization point is reached, at which every sentence which will ever stabilize has already stabilized. Paradoxical sentences like the Liar never stabilize: instead, they oscillate endlessly between truth and falsity. Yablo (1985) has developed a similar construction in which better and better approximations to the ideal represented by Tarski's convention T are achieved at each stage. Gupta's construction has the advantage that it makes all theorems of logic stably true, for example, 'the Liar sentence is true or it's not true' becomes stably true on his account. On Yablo's account, not all such theorems of logic come out as definitely and uniquely true, but his account instead respects an intuition about the 'groundedness' of truth: a disjunction should not count as true unless one of its disjuncts does; a conjunction should not count as false unless one of its conjuncts does, etc. The principal drawback to approaches such as Gupta's and Yablo's is that any attempt to say anything definite about the paradoxical sentences of natural language runs afoul of another paradoxical diagonal argument. For instance, Gupta's theory leads one to divide the sentences of a natural language like English into three categories: stably true, stably false, and paradoxical. Since Gupta's theory is presented in English, it would seem that English has the capacity of expressing these concepts. Therefore, it should be possible to express the concept of 'superheterologicality': a predicate of English is superheterological if and only if it is either false of itself, or results in a paradoxical sentence when applied to itself. On Gupta's account, the predicate 'is superheterological' results in a paradoxical sentence when applied to itself. But this means that, by definition, 'is superheterologicaF is superheterological, and so it should result in a true sentence when applied to itself. Gupta's diagnostic theory about semantic paradox is subject to the very same sort of paradox. Anyone who is really convinced that the semantic paradoxes are insoluble must follow Wittgenstein's dictum from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:
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'whereof we cannot speak, thereof must we remain silent.' Semantic theory on this conception must remain radically incomplete: it may assert that certain sentences are true and others false, but it must not try to introduce any tertiwn quid. Any attempt to distinguish the paradoxical as a separate semantic category will simply reintroduce paradoxically into one's semantic theory itself.
6. Proposed Solutions to the Liar Paradox in Natural Language 6.1 Blocking Self-Reference: The Redundancy Theory of Truth

Frank Ramsey in 1927 proposed the redundancy theory of truth as a way of averting the semantic paradoxes in natural language. Ramsey denied that 'is true' is a predicate at all. Instead, 'is true' is simply a redundant operator: to say ' "snow is white" is true' is simply a long-winded way of saying 'snow is white.' A Liar sentence, like 'this sentence is not true,' is simple nonsense. Unfortunately, this theory cannot account for sentences in which the place of the truthbearer is replaced by a variable of quantification, as in: 'whatever the Pope says is true,' or 'I hope that what Jones says is true'. 6.2 Denying the Universality of Pretheoretical Natural Language Saul Kripke (1975) developed an inductive construction in which the extension (the set of sentences of which the predicate is true), and the anti-extension (the set of sentences of which it is false) of the predicate 'is true' are gradually increased, beginning with an empty interpretation, in which both extension and anti-extension are empty, and ending with some sort of fixed point, at which Tarski's Convention T is at least approximated. Kripke's work inspired similar constructions by Gupta (1982), Burge (1979), Herzberger (1982), and Yablo (1985). At one of Kripke's fixed points, some sentences are true, some are false, and some (like the Liar sentence) have a truth-value 'gap.' In order to avoid being liable to semantic paradox himself, Kripke distinguishes between pretheoretical natural language, which, he claims, lacks the conceptual resources needed to express the trichotomy true/false/neither, and the theoretical metalanguage in which he expresses his theory. Kripke, as well as Herzberger (1982), denies that the claim to universality is essential to natural language. In some sense, Kripke would admit, his theory is expressed in natural language, but it is in natural language at a different stage of conceptual development from the natural language which is its object of investigation. In effect, Kripke introduces a Tarskian hierarchy of languages by suggesting a theory of the dynamics of language change. In fact, however, ordinary English does seem to have the capacity of expressing the con-

Paradoxes, Semantic cept 'neither true nor false,' since this is a phenomenon which occurs in other contexts, as in the case of presupposition failure (e.g., 'the present king of France is bald'). In any case, the transition from metalanguage to metametalanguage does not seem to require any further 'conceptual' change. 6.3 Separating Assertibility and Deniability from Truth and Falsity By means of the diagonal argument, it is possible to construct a Liar sentence L which says: L is not true (either false, or neither-true-nor-false, or paradoxical, or whatever). Clearly, one cannot truthfully assign the value 'true' to L, since this quickly leads to a contradiction. So, if the semantic theory says anything at all about L, it must say that L is not true (because paradoxical, or whatever). But this means that the theory will include a statement which is equivalent in meaning to the paradoxical sentence L. This is known as the problem of the Strengthened or Extended Liar. (The problem of superheterologicality above is an example of this phenomenon.) In the 1980s, two novel solutions to this problem were proposed. T. Parsons (1984) has suggested that we deny that L is true without asserting the paradoxical claim that L is not true. Feferman (1984) has proposed that it should be asserted that L is not true without claiming that what has been asserted (which amounts to L itself) is true. Thus, either deniability is distinguished from the assertibility of the negation, or assertibility is distinguished from truth. Both involve quite radical departures from ordinary practice. 6.4 Accepting Some Contradictions as True An even more radical departure from ordinary practice was suggested by Graham Priest (1984). He recommends accepting as true the claim: 'the Liar sentence is both true and false.' Priest does not propose the development of a consistent theory (in some metalanguage) about an inconsistent semantic theory (expressed in the object language); such a proposal would be a variant of Kripke's (see Sect. 6.2 above). Instead, Priest rejects the object/metalanguage distinction and knowingly embraces an inconsistent theory about the paradoxical. This necessitates the development of a 'paraconsistent logic' in which, unlike classical logic, not everything follows from a contradiction. Unfortunately, such logic turns out to be quite weak, lacking such rules as modus ponens and the disjunctive syllogism. 6.5 Context-Dependent Type Theory The semantic paradoxes can be averted and the universality of natural language preserved if a natural language is identified with a transfinite Tarskian hierarchy of formal languages. Unfortunately, there are several obvious objections to such an identification. First, there is nothing in the syntax of natural language to suggest the existence of Tarskian type restrictions. Second, paradoxical statements like the Liar do not seem to be ungrammatical. Third, when making some claim about all or some sentences of a certain kind, such as 'All of Nixon's utterances about Watergate are false,' the speaker typically has no way of knowing the Tarskian levels of Nixon's relevant statements, and so has no idea of the appropriate level to attach to his own use of 'false.' Fourth, as Kripke (1975) and Prior (1961) have pointed out, the paradoxicality of some statements depends on contingent, empirical facts. Paradoxicality does not seem to be an intrinsic feature of the meaning or logical form of a sentence. For example, the sentence 'the sentence written on the blackboard in Waggener Hall 321 on June 12, 1990 at noon is false' is paradoxical if that very sentence is in fact on that blackboard at that time, a fact which cannot be ascertained simply by inspecting the sentence itself. All of these objections can be met if the relativity to a Tarskian level is a pragmatic, context-dependent feature of a sentence token. This idea was first proposed by Ushenko (1957) and Donnellan (1957), and developed by Charles Parsons (1974), Burge (1979), Gaifman (1988), and Barwise and Etchemendy (1987). Burge combined the Tarskian hierarchy idea with Kripke's truth-value gap theory, stipulating that sentence tokens which are interpreted as containing an inappropriately low level of 'is true' are not to be categorized as ungrammatical or meaningless (as in Russell's or Tarski's type theory). Each level of truth is semantically incomplete: for each level a, some tokens are neither truea nor falsea. Each level of truth incorporates all of the semantical information about lower levels. Surge's account of the Strengthened Liar goes as follows. The Liar token L = L is not true is assigned the level 0. So, L = L is not true0. The token L is not in fact true0, since trutho cannot include any evaluation of paradoxical tokens like L (a consequence of the diagonal argument). Since L correctly states that it is not true0, L is truei. Truth, can incorporate the information about L's nontrutho. It is not in fact contradictory to conclude 'L is not true and L is true,' since the interpretation of the predicate 'is true' has shifted between the first and second conjunct, for context-dependent reasons. Barwise and Etchemendy (1987) have developed a similar account using what is known as 'situation theory,' combining non-well-founded set theory with a realist theory about such entities as properties, relations, and propositions. Gaifman (1988) and Koons (1990) have developed algorithms for assigning Tarski/Burge levels to occurrences of 'is true' in concrete networks of tokens. A difficulty which remains to be overcome is the development of an account of how the theory itself can be stated with sufficient generality, given the restriction that every occurrence of 'is true' must be assigned to some definite level
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Truth and Meaning in the Tarskian hierarchy. In response to the same problem in connection with ramified type theory, Russell introduced the idea of 'typical ambiguity.' As an alternative, Barwise and Etchemendy have suggested that some occurrences of 'is true' be interpreted as transcending the Tarskian hierarchy altogether. Paradoxes can be avoided by denying such transcendent status to the relevant occurrences of 'is true' in paradoxical statements. McGee (1991) offers a suggestion along these lines inspired by Carnap's idea of the partial definition of theoretical predicates. McGee distinguishes between truth and definite truth: the Liar may be either true or false (we cannot say which), but it is neither definitely true nor definitely not true. McGee agrees with Tarski that natural language is inconsistent, since the ordinary notion of truth carries with it Tarski's T schema, which leads to inconsistency. McGee urges that we replace this ordinary concept with a scientifically respectable but only partially defined predicate. We should no longer assert the Tarski biconditionals, although we can continue to use the corresponding inference rules (from 'p' to infer 'True(p)', and vice versa) outside hypothetical contexts. We cannot assert that the Liar (and other pathological propositions) are not true, but we can assert that they are not definitely true. McGee avoids a paradox involving definite truth ('This sentence is not definitely true') by denying that we can assert all instances of the schema DT: if 'p' is definitely true, then p. The set of definite truths may be inconsistent, if the meaning postulates embedded in our current scientific language are (unbeknownst to us) inconsistent. See also: Categories and Types; Formal Semantics; Metalanguage versus Object Language; Presupposition; Truth and Paradox.
Bibliography Barwise J, Etchemendy J 1987 The Liar: An Essay on Truth and Circularity. Oxford University Press, New York Burge T 1979 Semantical paradox. Journal of Philosophy 76: 169-98 Church A 1979 A comparison of Russell's resolution of the semantical antinomies with that of Tarski. Journal of Symbolic Logic 41: 747-60 Donnellan K 1957 A note on the liar paradox. The Philosophical Review 65: 394-97 Feferman S 1984 Toward useful type-free theories, I. Journal of Symbolic Logic 49: 75-111 Gaifman H 1988 Operational pointer semantics: Solution to the self-referential puzzles, I. In: Vardi M (ed.) Proceedings of the Second Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Reasoning About Knowledge. Morgan Kaufman, Los Altos, CA Grelling K, Nelson L 1908 Bemerkungen zu den Paradoxien von Russell und Burali-Forti. Abhandlungen der Friesischen Schule 1: 301-34 Gupta A 1982 Truth and paradox. Journal of Philosophical Logic 11: 61-102 Herzberger H G 1982 Notes on naive semantics. Journal of Philosophical Logic 11: 1-60 Koons R 1990 Three solutions to the liar paradox. In: Cooper R, Mukai K., Perry P (eds.) Situation Theory and Its Applications. Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford, CA Koons R 1992 Paradoxes of Belief and Strategic Rationality. Cambridge University Press, New York Kripke S 1975 Outline of a theory of truth. Journal of Philosophy 72: 690-716 Martin R L (ed.) 1984 Recent Essays on Truth and the Liar Paradox. Clarendon Press, Oxford McGee V 1991 Truth, Vagueness and Paradox. Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis, IN Moody E A 1953 Truth and Consequence in Medieval Logic. North Holland, Amsterdam Parsons C 1974 The liar paradox. Journal of Philosophical Logic 3: 381-412 Parsons T 1984 Assertion, denial and the liar paradox. Journal of Philosophical Logic 13: 137-52 Priest G 1984 Logic of paradox revisited. Journal of Philosophical Logic 13: 153-79 Prior A N 1961 On a family of paradoxes. Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 2: 16-32 Richard J 1906 Les Principes des mathematiques et le probleme des ensembles. Acta Mathematica 30: 295-% Russell B 1908 Mathematical logic as based on the theory of types. American Journal of Mathematics 30: 222-62 Simmons K 1990 The diagonal argument and the liar. Journal of Philosophical Logic 19: 277-304 Ushenko 1957 An addendum to the note on the liar paradox. The Philosophical Review 65: 394-97 Yablo S 1985 Truth and reflection. Journal of Philosophical Logic 14: 297-349

Picture Theory of Meaning
D. E. B. Pollard

The term 'meaning' is susceptible of many different and sometimes conflicting characterizations. The term 'picture,' by contrast, seems more intuitively accessible,
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and naturally suggests something visible. The term 'picture theory of meaning,' therefore, signals an analogy if not a metaphor which purports to elucidate

Picture Theory of Meaning something fundamental about the way language works and fulfills its communicative function. 1. Preliminary Considerations Among the most general if simple-minded questions one can ask about language is: how is it that a sequence or combination of words can be used to represent things in the world? Another question is: how is it that we can understand sentences composed of familiar words but which we have never heard before? Questions such as these raise a more general issue, namely, what (if any) are the most general and abstract constraints on what and how language can be said to represent? The idea that language has a representational function is probably as common as it is ancient. Indeed, the notion of representation itself carries with it the suggestion of some sort of matching or correlation of language with what lies beyond it. Thus sentences (and the words of which they consist) get their meaning, if not their truth and reference, by virtue of such a relation. Where truth is concerned, the traditional notion has been that of correspondence. A sentence, or rather the proposition it expresses, is said to be true if it corresponds to reality. The exact nature of this correspondence has proved difficult to articulate, but some recent theories of meaning have taken the notion of truth as central to the project of explaining meaning and understanding. According to this kind of approach, understanding a sentence is knowing the conditions for it to be true. The attractiveness of the picture theory of meaning is that it promises to deliver a detailed account of this representational relationship between language and the world. 2. Elements of a Theory The most comprehensive and sustained articulation of a picture theory of meaning is undoubtedly that due to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. In his famous early work, the Tractates Logico-Philosophicus, he speaks of sentences or propositions as pictures. For him, the essence of representation is description, and a proposition represents what he calls a possible 'state of affairs.' By itself, a proposition neither asserts or denies anything. Crucial to Wittgenstein's account are two theses: (a) isomorphism, i.e., there must be a one-to-one correspondence between the elements of a proposition and the elements of the state of affairs it represents. In other words, it must have the same structure and number of elements as the reality it portrays; (b) atomism, i.e., every proposition is a function of its constituent expressions, and in the case of the most basic or elementary propositions, these constituent expressions must be simple names, expressions which are not further analyzable and which appropriately and uniquely identify individual basic objects—the most fundamental constituents of reality. These simple names have reference only; their role or meaning resides solely in their having such unique reference. The picturing relationship, therefore, depends ultimately upon this basic relation between names and objects. More complex propositions are functions of such elementary propositions, that is to say, they are truth-functional compounds generated by means of logical constants or operators such as 'not,' 'and,' 'or,' etc.. The truth status (truth-value) of such compounds depends entirely on the truth possibilities assigned to the constituent propositions. Thus in the case of negation, for example, the proposition // is not the case that it is snowing is false if it is in fact snowing and true if it is not snowing. Any logic satisfying this compositional feature is usually described as 'extensional', and where just the two truth values 'true' and 'false' are operative, the logic is generally also called 'classical.' An important characteristic of the elementary propositions which distinguishes them from all the others, is that they are independent of one another: no one of them depends for its truth (or comprehension) on any other elementary proposition. As to the logical constants themselves, their function is not representational: they merely signify the operations by which the compound propositions are generated.
3. Problems and Criticisms

Some problems are specific to Wittgenstein's own version of the theory, and they have produced a considerable secondary literature of exegesis and interpretation. Among these problems are the notion of 'logical form' (the form elementary propositions are supposed to share with the corresponding state of affairs) and the fact that the 'basic' objects are not explicitly characterized. In this latter respect, the account differs from the theory of logical atomism put forward by Bertrand Russell. However, there are more general difficulties. First of all, there is a problem with any austerely extensional treatment of language. There are a number of constructions which are not readily or immediately accommodated within such a scheme, e.g., modal contexts of the form 'Necessarily p" or 'Possibly /?,' and statements of 'prepositional attitude' like Joan believes (hopes, fears) thatp, which at least prima facie look like logical functions of the constituent proposition/?. However, in neither of these cases does the truth-value of the constituent proposition totally determine the truth-value of the compound. For example, it could be true that Joan believes that the Earth is flat regardless of whether the proposition that the Earth is flat is true or false. Second, there is a wide variety of propositions for which the pictorial analogy seems counterintuitive or implausible. Examples of these include not only those mentioned above, but also the highly abstract propositions of mathematics, the general or law-like statements of the kind typical of scientific theory and physics in particular, and those propositions which conspicuously exhibit the feature commonly termed
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Truth and Meaning 'egocentricity' or 'deixis,' like / shall see you there tomorrow. Ultimately, however, even the most banal examples seem to point up the salient differences between linguistic and pictorial modes of representation. If one takes the hackneyed example The cat sat on the mat, then a drawing of the relevant state of affairs would show the representation of a cat and the representation of a mat, but no obvious element answering to the linguistic element 'sat on.' Yet despite this difference, there is a sense in which it would be perfectly legitimate to claim that the same state of affairs has been communicated by both the drawing and the proposition.
4. The Aftermath of the Theory

Despite the general consensus that the picture theory is fatally flawed, some of its traits have proved remarkably tenacious. For at least some theorists, there remains a serious question of whether an atomistic metaphysics can be made to serve the project of constructing a theory of meaning for a formalized language, i.e., a rigorous technical idiom sufficiently sophisticated to render explicitly the subtleties and more contextually bound features of natural language. Additionally, many of the prominent logico-semantic theories are compositional, if not simply truth-functional in complexion, and usually appeal to some distinction between fundamental and derived semantic categories. Thus, for example, in some such schemes, sentences and (simple) nouns or nominals are taken as basic, while predicate and functional expressions are taken as belonging to a derived category of expressions which make sentences out of nouns or out of other sentences. So a predicate like '... is sitting' would combine with the noun 'Socrates' to yield the sentence Socrates is sitting. However, the demise of the original theory has also had its more skeptical consequences. The difficulty of constructing a plausible account of the central notion of isomorphism has raised doubts about the very feasibility of systematic attempts to 'match words to the world.' In the spirit of Wittgenstein's own later work,

it has been argued in some quarters that the notion of such an isomorphism of language and world is itself an artefact of language, 'a shadow cast by grammar.' The natural corollary of this view is that reality (or one's conception of it) is if anything constituted by language. In its most extreme form, this latter position implies that different languages embody 'distinct realities'. Interestingly, this issue of relativism in linguistic theory has an echo in discussions of artistic representation: if there are different conventions of pictorial representation rendering nugatory any claims to the effect that one kind of picture is any more 'objective' than any other, then it might be argued that this undermines the very metaphor or analogy on which the picture theory depends. Whether this point has negative implications for representational accounts of language in general remains an open question. See also: Wittgenstein, Ludwig.
Bibliography Ayer A J 1986 Ludwig Wittgenstein. Penguin Books, Harmondsworth Anscombe G E M 1967 An Introduction To Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Hutchinson, London Copi I M, Beard R W (eds.) 1966 Essays on Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London Hacker P M S 1981 The rise and fall of the picture theory. In: Block I (ed.) Perspectives on the Philosophy of Wittgenstein. Blackwell, Oxford Pears D F 1971 Wittgenstein. Fontana, London Russell B A W 1956 The philosophy of logical atomism. In: Marsh R C (ed.) Logic and Knowledge. Allen and Unwin, London Urmson J O 1956 Philosophical Analysis: Its Development Between the Two World Wars. Clarendon Press, Oxford Waismann F 1965 Principles of Linguistic Philosophy. Harre R (ed.) Macmillan, London Wisdom J 1969 Logical Constructions. Random House, New York Wittgenstein L 1953 (trans. Anscombe GEM) Philosophical Investigations. Blackwell, Oxford Wittgenstein L 1961 (trans. Pears D F, McGuiness B F) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London

Radical Interpretation
E. M. Flicker

The scenario of 'radical interpretation' is that of an individual—perhaps a field linguist—who finds herself amongst a people with which her own culture has had no previous contact, and who must try to come to
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understand them and their language. Philosophers in what may be called the 'interpretationist' school in analytic philosophy have thought that, by considering how she might proceed with her task, light

Radical Interpretation may be thrown on the nature of mental and semantic concepts. The tactic has a broadly verificationist inspiration: their idea is that one can find out what meaning and the mind are, by seeing how one detects them in others. 1. W. V. O. Quine Use of the scenario for this purpose first came to prominence with the publication in 1960 of Quine's Word and Object. The discussion in ch. 2 of 'radical translation' is a landmark in the philosophy of language, and all debate about the nature of meaning since is necessarily informed by, even if it rejects, Quine's approach. Quine subscribed to behaviorism about meaning, holding that, insofar as it is fixed at all, 'meaning is a property of behavior.' Accordingly, he set out to consider how much of ordinary semantic notions can be constructed from a basis of purely physical facts about the 'natives' disposition to verbal behavior. His true concern was thus not so much epistemic as metaphysical: not to see how we might in practice seek to determine the meanings of native sentences, but rather to explore how, as David Lewis has put it, 'the facts (about behavior) determine the facts (about meaning).' Quine used the scenario as a heuristic device to explore this latter question; although his verificationist leanings mean that for him the metaphysical question of if and how the facts are fixed becomes one with the question of how they might, at least in principle, be verified. Quine considered how a translator might arrive at a correct 'translation manual' from the natives' language into her own. He concluded, notoriously, that the data of natives' dispositions to verbal behavior does not suffice to narrow the choice down to just one: all the constraints available on the translator's task leave many manuals equally acceptable. The most disturbing element in this thesis of the 'indeterminacy of translation' was Quine's claim of the 'inscrutability of reference': there is no basis to discriminate between alternative 'analytical hypotheses' about sentences which assign different references to terms and predicates, where these yield logically equivalent translations for whole sentences. So, in Quine's example, it is indeterminate whether native talk is about rabbits, rabbit parts, or rabbit time-slices. This thesis about reference has been convincingly argued against by Evans, but it is now generally recognized that some considerable indeterminacy in translation exists. 2. Donald Davidson Quine was concerned solely with how the meaning of native sentences might be discovered by a translator. But it is now generally recognized that this task can be accomplished only simultaneously with another: the 'interpretation' of the speakers of the language to be translated—that is, the ascription to them of beliefs, desires, and other mental states. The impossibility demonstrated by Quine of constructing sentence meanings from facts about speakers' dispositions to verbal behavior is part of the more general falsity of behaviorism. Behaviorism is false because there is no simple, one-by-one relation of the mental states of persons to their observable behavior: what a person does in response to a given stimulus depends not just on what she believes, but also on what she wants, and there is no principled limit on the further mental states which may crucially affect her response. Similarly, what the sentences of a subject's language mean has no implications for her behavior except as mediated by her mental states. Thus Davidson, continuing the investigation of mental and semantic concepts by means of the radical interpretation scenario, noticed how meaning and belief 'conspire' together to determine which sentences a subject holds true (and hence which she will assent to). In Davidson's work the primary focus switches to the mental: his concern is with how a 'radical interpreter' might ascribe mental states to the natives. He holds that the essential nature of the mind can be illuminated by this method. He uses it to argue, for example, that beliefs are by nature mainly true. One must, he claims, use a principle of 'charity' in interpreting others—that is, ascribe to them mainly true beliefs; and he makes a characteristic interpretationist move from this claim about the inevitable method of interpretation, to a conclusion about the nature of belief itself. The product of a successful interpretation exercise will be both an ascription of beliefs, etc., to the natives, and a theory of meaning for their language. Davidson argues that, while explicit reduction of sentence meaning to non-semantic notions is impossible, by giving an account of how such an interpretation of a community can be achieved, one gives all that is needed by way of philosophical explanation of the nature of meaning. He holds that a theory of truth can serve as a theory of meaning, and has suggested that telling the radical interpretation story can also serve as all that is needed by way of philosophical explanation of what truth is. It has, however, been questioned whether the same story can illuminate both truth and meaning. 3. State of the Art That meanings cannot be constructed from speakers' dispositions, as Quine showed, is now generally recognized. But while Quine drew the moral that ordinary semantic notions are not scientifically respectable, most nowadays would conclude instead that his standard for respectability was too severe. But the appeal to radical interpretation in the philosophical elucidation of the mental and semantic remains much in evidence. Doubts about Davidson's work focus on two main issues. It is uncontroversial that an interpretation must 'make sense' of the individual(s) to be interpreted, and that this requires seeing a certain pattern in the interrelations amongst their mental

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Truth and Meaning states, and in how these states relate to the meanings of sentences of their language. But whether this requires the dominant role for 'charity' urged by Davidson, or exactly what this conies to, has been contested. More radically, the methodology behind the radical interpretation approach to meaning and the mind may be questioned. It assumes that an account of what mental states and meanings are is to be extracted from an account of how one goes about ascribing them to others; but the true relation of priority may be the reverse: it is not until there is a philosophical account of the nature of the mind, that it will be possible to determine how, if at all, one can come to know the mental states of others. See also: Indeterminacy of Translation.
Bibliography Blackburn S 1984 Spreading the Word. Clarendon Press, Oxford Davidson D 1984 Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Clarendon Press, Oxford Evans G 1975 Identity and predication. Journal of Philosophy 72:343-63 Goldman A 1989 Interpretation psychologized. Mind and Language 4:161-85 LePore E (ed.) 1986 Truth and Interpretation Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson. Blackwell, Oxford Lewis D 1974 Radical interpretation. Synthese 27:331-44 McGinn C 1977 Charity, interpretation and belief. Journal of Philosophy 74:521-35 Quine W V O 1960 Word and Object. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA

Rules
P. Pagin

The idea that linguistic practice is essentially rulegoverned has found widespread acceptance, especially among those engaged in constructive work in grammar or semantics, and has been regarded by some as almost self-evident. Nonetheless it is highly controversial within the philosophy of language. Proponents have suggested a great number of kinds of linguistic rule, and serious attempts at demarcating and explicating the concept of a rule have been made, whereas opponents have concentrated on more general epistemological issues particularly regarding what it is to know a language and the place that rules might have in such knowledge. (For further discussion, see Convention.) 1. The Concept of a Rule 1.1 General Characterization The term 'rule' belongs to a group of terms, including 'norm,' 'convention,' 'standard,' 'regulation,' 'directive,' 'instruction,' 'law' (in the prescriptive sense), many of which frequently occur together in dictionary explanations, sometimes presented as synonyms. Ordinary linguistic usage does not provide clear-cut distinctions and no taxonomic consensus has been established among theorists. Nevertheless, there are differences between the use of the term 'rule' and uses of its cognates which to some degree explain why it is often preferred in theories of language. (a) 'Rule' is less tied to the notion of an authority,
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(b) (c) (d)

(e)

(f)

for example with power to issue rules, than 'law' and 'regulation.' 'Rule' is more closely tied to the notion of guiding persons in action than are 'norm' and 'standard.' 'Rule' is more closely tied to the notion of evaluating actions as right or wrong than, for example, 'convention' and 'direction.' 'Rule' is more closely tied (than, for example, 'norm' and 'standard') to direct evaluation of action as opposed to indirect evaluation, in which someone is judged responsible for defects in a product. There is, however, a traditional distinction between on the one hand so-called rules of action, or ought-to-do rules (Tunsollen) and on the other hand so-called ideal rules, or ought-to-be rules (Seinsollen), such as standards for chemicals. ' Rule' has a stronger suggestion of arbitrariness than, for instance, 'norm.' It often refers to items that can be introduced, adopted, and replaced by decision, whereas 'norm' is typically used for standards perceived as not being subject to choice. Connected with this is the tendency, again marking a difference, to use 'norm' so that being in force, in a community, say, is built into the concept of being a norm. 'Rule,' more than related terms, is used with respect to special procedures (rules of inference) and institutionally created activities, such as games. The modern tradition distinguishes

Rules
between regulative rules, serving to regulate preexisting activities (traffic regulations), and so-called constitutive rules, which define institutions and create new types of action (like checkmating). (g) 'Rule' is tied to a notion of generality in a way which, for instance, 'instruction' is not and which is often taken to exclude overlap with the use of 'command.' Two kinds of generality are usually seen as characteristic of rules. On the one hand a rule concerns a type of action; it can be violated or complied with indefinitely many times. On the other hand it concerns agents generally, or agents in a type of situation; it can be violated or complied with by an indefinite number of people. Although this characterization is not without problems it points at a feature which can be claimed to be essential to the concept. (h) There is a use of 'rule,' as in 'strategic rule' and 'rule of thumb,' such that an item of this more factual kind (sometimes called technical) is subject to direct justification: does complying with it generally lead to desired results? It is essential here that what counts as a desired result is welldetermined; stating the purpose may be part of stating the rule (If you want to...) or else the purpose may be clear from the area of application of the rule (as in strategic rules of chess). This double usage is convenient, since something may be called a rule whether it imposes or just registers a regularity (such as a grammatical one). In explicating the concept of a rule some writers are content to elaborate on features such as those already listed. Some proceed to analyze the structure of rules. Von Wright (1963), by using 'norm' as the most general term, distinguishes between 'character' (obligation, permission, prohibition), 'content' (type of action or activity; that which is obligatory, permitted, prohibited) and 'condition of application' (a condition that is met in a situation where someone can act in accordance with or against the rule). He also distinguishes between categorical and conditional rules, and between positive, negative, and mixed rules, depending on whether the content is a type of doing something, forbearing to do something, or a mixed complex of these. This analysis is then fitted into a socalled deontic logic, that is, a logic of rules (norms, or better, norm-statements). Explications or analyses more or less similar to that of von Wright have been given within ethics and philosophy of law. What is generally missing in such treatments are distinctions between kinds of correctness: an utterance may be semantically correct and yet a violation of etiquette. That is, the particular respect in which actions are evaluated with respect to a rule is not perceived as corresponding to an ingredient in the rule itself. 1.2 What Rules Are The question of what rules really are has received much less attention. It is common to think of rules as abstract entities. Some, however, take them to be linguistic, while others take them to be nonlinguistic. Ross, for instance (1968), takes rules to be a species of directives, themselves intrinsically normative entities that are meanings of prescriptive sentences, like propositions are of descriptive sentences. Although rules have even been thought to be particular inscriptions of rule-sentences, the concept of a rule is normally distinguished from that of a formulation of a rule, as described by Max Black (1962). Black, however, denies that rule-formulations designate, describe, or even express rules (as their meanings). Instead, to understand what a rule is we must look to the use of rule-formulations. This is in line with Wittgenstein's later philosophy. To Wittgenstein (1958) the concept of a rule is a family resemblance concept: members of the family of rules have various features in common with other members, but it is misguided to look for any defining feature common to all members, an essence of rules. To understand the concept of a rule, consideration should be given not only to what is called a rule, but also to all that is involved in a rule-following practice, including training, explaining (how to proceed), justification (and limits thereof), and evaluation of actions by means of reference to rules. Many other theorists insist on social function or social acceptance as part of what it is to be a rule. Ross, for instance (1968), takes a rule to be a rule of some community, a (general) directive corresponding to social facts, being generally complied with in the community. Bartsch (1987) characterizes norms, social rules, as the social reality of correctness notions. This feature is particularly prominent in Shwayder's attempt at a truly informative explication (Shwayder 1965). Roughly, a rule (in the primary, communal sense) is a system of expectations in a community concerning behavior of its members, such that (a) members believe other members to have the same expectation, (b) the expectations of others constitute the reason for a member to act in accordance with them, and (c) members expect that other members conform for this reason. This idea has been developed and refined by David Lewis for the notion of a convention (regarded by Lewis as a kind of rule) and has, via Lewis, given rise to a whole tradition of varieties of the approach.
2. Linguistic Rules

The notion of a linguistic rule is perhaps most immediately associated with very general rules of traditional school grammars; rules of spelling (e.g., nn never occurs before t), phonological rules (e.g., voiced endings turning voiceless in certain contexts), morphological rules (e.g., endings of regular verbs in

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Truth and Meaning various tenses), and simple syntactic rules (e.g., noun and verb must agree in number). Rules of this kind are explicitly stated, used in language teaching, applied as standards of correct linguistic usage, and, usually in contradistinction to much else included in grammars, called rules. What should properly be called a linguistic rule, however, is another matter. To the extent that the required generality of a rule concerns its relation to behavior, the statement that killed is the past tense form of the verb kill is a statement of a rule, since it is general with respect to agents and highly general with respect to particular speech acts governed by it. Seen in this light the general rule about past tense forms of regular verbs appears to be a more factual or technical rule, a general guide or recipe for speaking in accordance with the more particular rules (governing individual verbs) that may be regarded as normative. In this way normativity, or the degree thereof, may be inversely related to the degree of generality. Stating that in English gold is a noun, or a mass noun, is not generally considered as stating a rule, but rather as stating a fact. To the extent that the property of being a mass noun in English is a conventional one, however, this is a fact about a convention, and the statement may then also be regarded as a statement of the convention, or rule, itself. Together with, say, the rule that mass nouns do not take the indefinite article, the rule (about gold) so stated also has a share in syntactic standards of linguistic behavior. Indeed, from a formal point of view it may be regarded as a rule of higher order, implicitly laying down what other (lower order) rules apply to gold (namely the rules governing mass nouns). On the other hand, however, the statement that gold is a mass noun may also be regarded in a number of other ways. The situation is quite unlike that with respect to formal languages. The class of sentences of a language for predicate logic is determined by a few simple clauses, stating on the one hand the basic vocabulary of signs of various categories, and on the other hand the formation rules, which comprise rules for forming atomic sentences (by way of joining terms and predicate letters) and for forming complex sentences out of these and the logical symbols (for example, if A and B are sentences, then A&B is a sentence). These rules are easily stated, and learned, and define the language in question. 2.1 Syntactic Rules in Generative Grammar Specifying the class of sentences of a natural language, like English, on the other hand, is the task of modern generative grammars. The syntactic part of such a grammar may consist of a set of phrase structure rules, a set of lexical insertion rules, and a set of transformation rules. Rules of the first kind produce so-called deep structures of sentences (the most basic being S -* NP VP, which, roughly stated, produces the category structure NOUN PHRASE-VERB PHRASE out of the category SENTENCE). Rules of the second kind provide for inserting linguistic expressions (lexical items) into structures, at appropriate places, depending on their respective categories (such as NOUN). Rules of the third kind are rules for transforming results of applying rules of the former kinds by way of operations such as reordering and deletion (as with the rule of equi NP deletion, for removing a repeated occurrence of a particular noun phrase). Such systems are readily understood as systems of rules for producing sentences. They are stated and can be followed. It is another question in what sense, if any, they are rules of a particular natural language. On the one hand the grammar may be incorrect in the sense of producing sentences which are not recognized as well-formed by speakers of the language. Even if correct its rules are clearly not, in any strict sense, followed by the speakers. Neither is it generally claimed by linguists that such rules are subconsciously operative in actual practice. It is, on the other hand, claimed, for example, by Chomsky (1976, 1980), that a grammar which is adequate in a stronger sense represents the linguistic competence of the speakers, their knowledge of the language. If this claim is good there is a sense in which the rules of such a grammar are rules of the language, but in that sense they can hardly be said to define it. 2.2 Semantic Rules With respect to formal languages semantic rules, concerning meaning, can be stated and regarded as just as normative/defining as formation rules. Carnap (1956) distinguishes between rules of designation for simple expressions (predicates—'H' designates Human—and individual constants—'s' designates Walter Scott) and rules of truth (e.g., A&B is true if and only if A is true and B is true). In addition to rules of this kind he also proposes so-called meaning postulates, such as a rule to the effect that the formal counterpart of Bachelors are not married is true, in order to capture nonlogical conceptual (analytical) truths. In Montague semantics (Montague and Thomason 1974) there are meaning postulates as well as semantic rules corresponding to Carnap's rules of truth (and also for other operators and functions of higher types), but they belong to a grammar for (a fragment of) natural English. Thus, they are presented as in some sense being rules of English. So-called truth theories of natural languages, according to Davidson's conception (1984), are to contain statements of virtually the same kind as Carnap's statements of rules of designation and rules of truth. However, to the extent that they are rule statements the rules are just rules of the theory; the claim that they govern the practice of the speakers is not part of the theory and it is also rejected by Davidson. In the conception of Lewis, on the other hand, the

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Rules connection between a set of abstract syntactic and semantic rules, thought of as defining a particular natural language, itself regarded as an abstract entity, is forged by means of a highly general rule, or convention (in Lewis's sense), which the speakers actually follow. 2.3 Semantic Rules in Generative Grammar In a grammar of modern linguistic theory the semantic component may look like this: on the one hand there is a so-called dictionary, the entries of which consist of lexical rules for primitive expressions, providing meaning (where possible by means of verbal meaning explanations) and grammatical category. On the other hand there are so-called projection rules for arriving at the meaning of complex expressions, and ultimately sentences, by way of selecting the readings of ambiguous simpler expressions that fit together within the more complex ones. In grammars of other kinds, however, what are thought of as semantic structures (doubling as phrase structures) are generated directly, providing the basis for transformations and insertion of lexical items. Such generating rules are not semantic in the sense of (directly and overtly) providing interpretations of linguistic expressions. Within modern linguistic theory the notion of a syntactic rule is clearer than that of a semantic rule, but for several reasons, in part connected with the existence of various constraints imposed on syntax by semantics or vice versa, the two notions are not sharply separated. 2.4 Semantic Rules and Language-games In Hintikka's game-theoretic semantics (Hintikka and Kulas 1983;), developed for both formal and natural languages, a different conception of semantic rules concerning truth can be found. A sentence S is true in case there is a winning strategy, for the player Myself against the player Nature, in the semantical game associated with S. Such a game is defined by a number of rules, such as: the first move in a game associated with a conjunction A&B is Nature's choice of either A or B, whereupon the rest of the game is that associated with Nature's choice (that is, A or B; since Nature makes the choice, Myself must have a winning strategy for A as well as for B). Hintikka connects this approach with Wittgenstein's notion of a languagegame, claiming that a speaker's understanding of a sentence actually consists of his mastery of the rules associated with it and that semantic (word-world) relations are established in linguistic activity as governed by such rules. In Sellars's writings (1963, 1974) a more abstract conception of the nature of semantic rules can be found. Sellars, too, employs the notion of a languagegame, and makes the analogy with (some) ordinary games rather close. In using a linguistic expression one takes a position in the language-game. A move in the game is a transition from one position to another. Rules of inference, material as well as formal (logical), govern such moves. One example (material) is the move from calling something red to calling it extended (the rule of which corresponds to a meaning postulate in Carnap's sense). Other rules, however, govern transitions which are not moves proper but transitions into (language entry) and out of (language departure) the game. The transition from observing a red patch to calling it red is of the former kind, and the transition from uttering / am going out to going out is of the latter kind. Rules of these three kinds determine the meaning of expressions, but for epistemological reasons (compare Sect. 3) they are primarily to be thought of as ought-to-be rules, that is, as rules providing standards for linguistic behavior, not as rules to be directly obeyed. Corresponding to these rules, however, there are ought-to-do rules for mature language users, requiring them to see to it that those standards are met, by training, teaching, and criticism (including self-criticism). Sellars's picture of linguistic practice as rule-governed is, of course, highly speculative, and it is doubtful that it can be borne out by more detailed considerations. The notion of a language-game is originally Wittgenstein's (1958). The analogy with games strongly suggests a view of linguistic practice as rulegoverned, and although it often arises in connection with other points, Wittgenstein repeatedly speaks of rules of language-games. It is open to debate, however, to what extent he acknowledges the existence of semantic rules as determining the meaning of linguistic expressions. On the one hand there are in Wittgenstein references to grammatical rules, though 'grammar' is not here used in the ordinary sense but rather in the sense of a set of standards of description, which themselves give rise to rules of inference. Such standards can be expressed in so-called grammatical statements, such as White is lighter than black, or An order orders its own execution. These rules provide for inferences from A is white and B is black to A is lighter than B, and from A was ordered to V and A didn 't V to A didn 't execute the order. They also exclude descriptions which are inconsistent with such inferences as nonsensical, counter to grammar. These grammatical statements are normative; they do not flow from the meanings of the words involved but are part of the determination of meaning. On the other hand it is not fully clear whether Wittgenstein's view was that there is, for example, a meaning-determining rule governing the use of red, or just something closely analogous, namely (institutional) standards of correctness of that use. The difference, if there is one, would be that if there were such a rule, then that rule would concern a certain transition, namely that from recognizing something as red to calling it red, and at least, so Wittgenstein argues, there is no rule of that kind. It may be,

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Truth and Meaning however, that the point is not to insist on a distinction, but to correct an erroneous conception of (semantic) rules. This is suggested in other passages, where it is stressed that the determination of the use of a word by rules is not complete; new situations can always arise which are not covered by the rules (so-called open-texture). 2.5 Pragmatic Rules The notion of pragmatic rules is one of rules governing linguistic activity in respects other than those of syntax and semantics, in respects peculiar to communication. This is an area where it is difficult to distinguish features characteristic of linguistic practice as such from other factors, such as (everyday) human psychology, cultural or social norms, and contexts; indeed the desirability of employing that distinction is also questionable. Nonetheless, elaborate pragmatic analyses in terms of linguistic rules have been carried out, above all concerning individual speech acts and features of conversational interaction. J. L. Austin (1976) introduced the notion of illocutionary acts, speech acts such as asserting, promising, commanding, congratulating. A speech act belongs to one of these categories by virtue of intrinsic properties, as opposed to properties depending on further reactions of the hearer, by virtue of which the act can be characterized as an act of scaring, amusing, or persuading. In contradistinction to acts of these kinds, called perlocutionary, illocutionary acts were held by Austin to involve conventions, but he did not develop this idea. It was later developed by Searle (1969), who extracted a number of rules for various kinds of illocutionary act. As regards promising, Searle's main example, there are five rules, understood as governing the use of expressions such as I promise and other linguistic devices indicating the illocutionary type of promising (and in virtue of this Searle characterizes these rules as semantic). The first of these requires that such an expression be uttered only in the context of predicating a future action of the speaker (the propositional content rule), the second that it be uttered only if the hearer prefers performance of that action to nonperformance and the speaker also believes this of the hearer, the third that it be uttered only if that action would not obviously be performed anyway (preparatory rules), the fourth that it be uttered only if the speaker intends to perform the action (the sincerity rule). These four rules are held to regulate the practice of promising. The fifth, on the other hand, the so-called essential rule, is seen by Searle as constitutive of that practice, as a rule which makes promising possible. This is the rule which (provided that the requirements of the first three rules are met) holds that such an utterance counts as undertaking an obligation to perform the action in question. These rule statements no doubt capture standard features of promisory utterances, even though Searle's conception of the rules themselves, especially the fifth, has been subject to discussion. A different kind of pragmatic rule is the one which Grice (1989) has labeled conversational maxims. It includes rules such as: Make your contribution as informative as required (for the current purposes of the exchange)! Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence! Be relevant! By means of reference to such rules Grice explains varieties of so-called conversational implicature, as in the phenomenon of deliberately conveying or implying something else than one is literally saying.
3. Is Linguistic Practice Ride-governed?

The idea that linguistic practice is essentially rulegoverned, that the meaning of linguistic expressions is determined by rules, is intimately connected with a conception of linguistic capacity as a kind of knowledge. On this conception a speaker stands in a cognitive relation to his own mother tongue; his ability to use it is a way of knowing the meaning of its expressions. Given the further idea that the meaning of a linguistic expression is arbitrary, the speaker's knowledge must be a knowledge of rules. These two tenets, about determination of meaning by rules and about knowledge of one's language, are almost invariably discussed together. 3.1 Language as Conventional The most basic conception of meaning as determined by rules is that of meaning as conventional. One argument against this (Davidson 1984) is that we can give an account of what a speaker means by his words without requiring that the speaker knows the meaning of his words, and hence without requiring that he knows conventions. The basic point of another wellknown argument (Quine 1976) is that, since proponents of the view must ultimately appeal to unstated conventions, the claim that speakers go by conventions runs the risk of becoming empty (for more on this, see Convention). Sellars, too (1974), stresses that only antecedently stated rules can be said to be obeyed. His conclusion, however, is that for this reason rules which determine meaning must be so-called ought-to-be rules (compare Sect. 2.4). In this way Sellars hopes to avoid a regress: knowledge of language requires knowledge of rules, which is knowledge of rule formulations, which in turn requires knowledge of language, and so on. However, since just conforming to ought-to-be linguistic rules, in Sellars's view, falls short of constituting understanding, it is not clear that the regress is really avoided. 3.2 Wittgenstein on Normative Linguistic Practice In Wittgenstein's view (1958) there are other ways of stating rules than that of providing full-fledged verbal

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Rules formulations. The word elephant can be explained (partially, at least) by pointing at one, saying that that is an elephant. The point is that in doing so it is not just giving one example of how the word is applied, not just giving a hint for guessing at how to apply it in other cases. It is an explanation in its own right, a way of specifying the standards governing the use of the word, a way of expressing a rule. The tendency to think otherwise, that is, to think that no number of mere examples of using a word, or applying a rule, could determine future applications, presupposes that understanding of an expression, grasp of a rule, is something essentially private, something which cannot be fully conveyed to others. But, so Wittgenstein argues, nothing mental could determine the correctness or incorrectness of future applications, since anything mental could at most be contingently related to them. Hence, understanding cannot be essentially private, a hidden mental phenomenon; if a word is understood, then it can also be explained to others. Wittgenstein's point of departure is the practice of speaking a common language. Such a practice stands out as normative, involving training, explaining, and correcting. Accordingly, a speaker taking part in the practice is pictured as one who has acquired knowledge of the practice, a great number of interrelated abilities. Such an ability is not only in conformance with communal standards, but is an ability to specify and independently apply those standards. Only within such a practice does a rule-formulation have meaning. The rule, however, is no more precise than the interpretation of the expression of the rule. Therefore, what is determined by, or is a consequence of, a rule, is nothing other than that which is determined within the practice of applying that rule (and related rules). This has consequences within the philosophy of mathematics (Wittgenstein 1978). It is a necessary outcome of rules of mathematics that 2 + 3 = 5 only insofar as this is regarded as a necessary outcome within mathematical practice. Saying that it is a necessary outcome is a legitimate way of expressing a normative attitude, the attitude of treating 2 + 3 = 5 as unshakable, immune to revision, as a rule of grammar, in Wittgenstein's sense, but humans are inclined to misconceive themselves as having observed a logical or metaphysical fact, independent of any human activity, as if the rules could grind out consequences on their own. On Wittgenstein's view there must be something intermediary between finding out the consequences of a rule and just adding to the explanation, or definition, of the rule itself. The notion of such an intermediary is, however, problematic. Following the publication of Kripke's seminal interpretation of Wittgenstein in Kripke (1982), much interest has been devoted to questions of rule following, normativity of language and the role of speech communities. For an overview, see Boghossian (1989). 3.3 Deep Linguistic Competence In Chomsky's view (1976, 1980, 1986), if there are two grammars for a given language, both of which correctly specify the class of sentences of that language, then there is a basis for claiming that only one of them is the correct one, that it specifies the class of sentences in the right way. What the right way is depends on the linguistic knowledge of the speakers. That knowledge is knowledge of the rules of the language. It is not knowledge of any ordinary kind, but a special kind of competence, consisting in having the rules of the language internally represented, in the mind, or in the brain. That grammar is correct which provides the rules which are so represented. This conception is shared by many other linguists. Linguistics is, accordingly, regarded as a branch of psychology. According to Chomsky, the correct grammar is the one which conforms to general grammatical principles, together making out the so-called 'universal grammar.' These principles are common to all humanly possible languages. On the one hand these principles specify grammatical categories and category structures, like the noun phrase-verb phrase structure, which are common to all possible languages, and on the other hand they impose restrictions on further rules; some transformations, for instance, are acceptable, while others are not. The universal grammar is thought by Chomsky to play the decisive role in the explanation of language acquisition. The problem is to explain how the child, being exposed to only a comparatively small number of grammatically well-formed sentences, can develop the competence to produce an indefinite number of well-formed sentences himself. The reason why this is a problem is that the fragment of sentence examples which the child has encountered can be described by infinitely many different grammars, most of which do not correctly describe the whole language. Somehow the child learns to conform to rules that are correct, not only for the initial fragment, but for the entire language. This is explained as follows. Given a sufficiently large and diverse finite set of sentences of a language, the universal grammar, in virtue of the restrictions it imposes on acceptable rules, selects the correct grammar of the language. Assuming that the child's development is somehow guided, or determined, by the principles of the universal grammar, the set of sentence examples which the child encounters will yield internal representations of the rules of the correct grammar. Thus, the acquisition of linguistic competence can be explained by assuming that the universal grammar, or. knowledge of it, is innate, perhaps in virtue of the structure of the brain.
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3.4 Criticism of the Idea of Deep Linguistic Competence This theory has met with much criticism, only some of which, however, focuses on the nature of rules. Quine (1976) has rejected the idea that there is anything intermediary between, on the one hand, merely conforming to rules and, on the other hand, being guided by explicitly stated rules. You can learn a foreign language by way of learning to follow rules, as explicitly stated, but you do not learn your mother tongue that way. Since there is nothing intermediary, learning a mother tongue is not a matter of acquiring rules at all. Consequently there is no basis for claiming that a grammar which correctly specifies the class of sentences of a language may still be incorrect. The student can only choose between equally good grammars on the basis of preference for elegance and simplicity. An extensive criticism, based on interpretation of Wittgenstein, directed at Chomsky and other linguists as well as at several modern philosophers of language, has been provided by Baker and Hacker (1984). First of all, they stress that to the extent that there are rules of a language, these rules have normative force. Only rules which speakers of the language in fact express, apply, and appeal to in teaching, justification, and criticism can have normative force. Rules which are only discovered by the linguist and thought to operate unconsciously, by way of being internally represented, cannot have any normative force and are not, therefore, rules which govern the linguistic practice. This issue, however, runs the risk of reducing to a terminological one about the word rule, and it is treated as such in Chomsky (1986). Another, even more basic, point concerns the very notion of a set of rules which determine the whole class of well-formed, meaningful sentences, and also provide interpretations of them. According to Baker and Hacker, this conception belongs to the mistaken picture of rules grinding out consequences on their own. The correct view is that the meaning of an expression is determined by nothing else than its actual use. This holds for complex expressions as much as for individual words. It is a mistake to think that the meaning of a sentence is determined in advance. It is again a mistake to think that a line can be drawn, once and for all, between what is a sentence and what is not a sentence, and between expressions that make sense and expressions that do not. Something which does not make sense in one context of use may make perfectly good sense in another. Above all, so Baker and Hacker claim, it is a mistake to think that there is any particular problem about producing and understanding new sentences, something which needs to be explained and which is to be explained by appeal to rules. Only if it is assumed that the meaning of a new sentence is determined in advance does the question arise as to how one can
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know what it is. Against this, however, it can be said that what needs to be explained is just the fact that speakers do understand new sentences in the same way, regardless of whether the meanings of those sentences are determined in advance. It seems plausible that an appeal to rules is part of a good explanation of this fact. It is another question whether the normative aspect of rules has a role to play in such an explanation. 3.5 Concluding Remarks A person can be said to have an ability only if what counts as success, in exercising that ability, is sufficiently well determined. In the case of linguistic abilities, however, it can only be speakers of the language who decide what is to count as success. So it seems that what counts as successful exercise of linguistic abilities is determined precisely by exercise of linguistic abilities. This makes the notion of rules of language problematic. On the other hand, if we want to retain the idea of a common language as something which all members in a speech community know, something which is more than just similarities in the ways speakers talk and interpret each other, then it seems that the notion of normative rules of language is required, for without this notion it remains unclear what a common language, so conceived, would be. See also: Analyticity; Convention; Conversational Maxims; Game Theoretical Semantics; Language Game; Montague Grammar; Private Language. Bibliography
Austin J L 1976 How to Do Things with Words, 2nd edn. Oxford University Press, Oxford Baker G P, Hacker P M S 1984 Language. Sense A Nonsense. Basil Blackwell, Oxford Baker G P, Hacker P M S 1985 Wittgenstein. Rules. Grammar and Necessity. Basil Blackwell, Oxford Bartsch R 1987 Norms of Language. Longman, London Black M 1962 The analysis of rules. In: Models and Metaphors. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY Boghossian P 1989 The rule following considerations. Mind 98: 507-549 Carnap R 1956 Meaning and Necessity, 2nd edn. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL Chomsky N 1976 Reflections on Language. Temple Smith, London Chomsky N 1980 Rules and Representations. Basil Blackwell, Oxford Chomsky N 1986 Knowledge of Language: Its Nature. Origin and Use. Praeger, New York Davidson D 1984 Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Clarendon Press, Oxford Grice P 1989 Studies in the Ways of Words. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Gumb R D 1972 Rule-governed Linguistic Behavior. Mouton, The Hague Hintikka J, Kulas J 1983 The Game of Language. Reidel, Dordrecht

As human beings, we may decide not to eat or drink, not to talk or communicate, or perhaps not even to live, but as long as we do live we cannot choose not to convey 'meaning' to the surrounding world. 'Semiotics,' in the broadest sense, is the study of the basic human activity of creating meaning. 'Signs' are all types of elements—verbal, nonverbal, natural, artificial, etc.—which carry meaning. Thus, semiotics is the study of sign structures and sign processes. In certain research traditions, the name of this study has been 'semiology'; the distinction between semiology and semiotics has often been interpreted conceptually, and not just terminologically, whereas today this superficial distinction has been abandoned: 'semiotics' is the generally accepted ecumenical term, which will also be adopted here. As a specific discipline, semiotics is most developed as the study of the signs which function in the world of human activity. Here, semiotics investigates three fundamental problems. First, how the world which surrounds us is 'constituted' as a human environment because of our perception and apprehension of it through signs; second, how this world is coded and decoded, and thus made into a 'specific cultural domain' consisting of networks of signs; third, how we 'communicate' and 'act' through signs in order to make this domain a collectively shared cultural universe. Semiotics may deal with the basic and general aspects of such a study; in this case neighboring areas, covered by specialized disciplines such as linguistics, psychology, anthropology, sociology, or aesthetics, will to a certain extent be subsumed by semiotics. Semiotics also carries out investigations of concrete

sign processes. In this case, semiotics will have to take into account signs of different 'types' which are simultaneously engaged in the process, such as signals, multileveled meaning structures, unintended manifestations of meaning, etc., and their different systems of expression or 'media' (visual, verbal, gestural, tactile, etc.). As a discipline in its own right, albeit a not too sharply delimited one, or as an integrated part of other disciplines, semiotics is involved whenever the production and exchange of information and meaning is studied. Such studies range from animal communication, through stimulus and response processes occurring throughout the biosphere, to the processing of information in machines. In these contexts, while semiotics does not define the fundamental research questions, it contributes methodologically or conceptually to the actual investigations. 1. Basic Semiotic Notions The key notions of semiotics are generated in a variety of disciplines, and semiotic research is carried out by different semiotic schools. This situation produces a different terminology and different specific research interests inside the entire field of semiotics, but five notions are recurrent 'attractors' for the semiotic enterprise through the modern history of semiotics to the late-twentieth-century state of affairs, and will remain so in the future of semiotics. These five notions are 'code,' 'structure,' 'sign,' 'discourse,' and 'text.' The following presentation of the notions opens with the most abstract ones, 'code' and 'structure.' They are modified by semiotics in order to serve its purpose: the study of the production of 'meaning.'

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Truth and Meaning The following notions, 'sign' and 'discourse,' bring out the increasing complexity of the process of creating meaning. The final notion 'text,' encompasses the whole field of semiotics. content has emerged. The codes have been creating 'meaning.' Only codes such as these are 'semiotic codes.' The minimal requirements for the existence of semiotic codes and of the process they initiate are more complex than for the code in general. In semiotics, two elements and a combination rule will not suffice: the elements 0 and 1 combined through a rule creating the series 0101010101... do not necessarily produce meaning. At least two sets of elements are required, each of them combined by using one or more rules according to selected features, e.g., clothing as fashion as one set and a more or less closed system of perceptual categories or social values as another. If one then has a rule for the combination of the two systems, so that one system can refer to or represent the other, it can be said that 'meaning' is produced. In semiotics two levels of coding are at work simultaneously: at one level a code unites a set of elements as a well-defined, but not necessarily closed system, and at another a code combines at least two such systems. Here it can be said that the code transforms or translates one system into the other. In agreement with Umberto Eco (1984:164-88), the codes working at the first level could be called code systems or 's-codes,' and the codes working at the second level could be called transformation codes or simply codes. In language for example, the s-codes organize the semantic system and the expression system, while the codes bring about the combination of these systems into meaningful language signs. Semiotics works on the assumption that s-coded systems from which features relevant for the production of meaning can be selected already exist. The way these systems are built up in detail is not the subject of semiotics (but may be an area for linguistics, perceptual psychology, etc.). When the painter puts his name on the canvas, the s-coded expression system of colored letters and the s-coded system of the more or less institutionalized social activity of creating art are combined through the coded process of signing, and the meaning 'Picasso did this painting' occurs. If a more complex case like a theater performance is looked into, then a whole series of s-coded systems is met (dress, verbal dialog, hairdo, body movements, lighting, etc.) and a tight network of codes combining them in different ways and perhaps ways which change during the performance. The result is a highly complex and often, as in most works of art, ambiguous meaning. The two-level semiotic coding process does not normally give rise to propositions which are clearly true or false as in logic, but to a complex meaning which functions on all levels of our culture.

1.1 Code Imagine a painter at work. He chooses different colors at the palette, mixes them, and, through repeated strokes of the brush, he combines the colors on the canvas. When he is finished, he adds his signature. A process of selection and combination of colors and letters has taken place, and a complex cultural sign, a work of art, has come into being. This process is a rule-governed activity. The rules governing the combination and selection are called codes. Not all the coding mechanisms involved in the process are semiotically relevant, and the study of codes in general is broader than semiotics. From a simple definition of code, the discussion now moves to a more complex one of genuine semiotic character. Assume that there are two elements which can be distinguished from each other. If a rule for their interrelation can be set up, the minimal requirement for the existence of a code will be fulfilled. The rule is a code. If the elements are characterized by one feature, say a straight line and a curved line, and if the rule dictates size, distance, iteration, vertical and horizontal order, it would be possible to produce most of the letters of the Latin alphabet through a coded process of 'combination' of the elements according to the rule. That is what the painter actually did when he signed the painting with his name. If the elements are characterized by more than one feature, for instance if color is added to the straightness and curvedness of the lines, the rule must also be capable of'selecting' among the different features, for instance shape 'or' color, or shape and color, in order to convey a 'specific identity' to the element in relation to other elements. Thus, the relevance of the selected features, and hence the identity of the element, is context-dependent, i.e., dependent on the context in which the rule-governed combination is to be realized. If color and not shape is selected as the relevant feature, the rule of combination may produce an aesthetic object and not the letters. The elements are placed in an aesthetic context. If color is irrelevant and only shape is relevant, letters may be produced. One's signature on a contract is valid whether it is signed with blue, black, or green ink. But the two features, color and shape, may interact, as is most often the case, and create the signature of a painter on canvas, for example. So far no specific semiotic codes, but only the code in general, has been dealt with: a rule for the selection and combination of relevant features in given elements. But when the painter has finished his picture 1.2 Structure through the coded combinations of (at least) color Semiotics has often been seen as totally absorbed by and shape, ending with a signature, an object with a the structuralist wave. According to structuralist
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thought, the structure is an immanent relational network of elements constituting an object. The network is the specific identity of the object. So, the notion of structure and the notion of s-code is the same. As the s-code is only of semiotic interest when connected with the code proper, it is necessary to modify the general and rigid definition of the structure, in order to make it a semiotic prerequisite for the understanding of the occurrence of signs. However, the notion of structure has played an important role in semiotics as an 'epistemological' and 'methodological' entity. In an epistemological perspective, the focus is on the ontological status of a structure. A structure is considered either as an immanent constitutive organization of the object itself, or as a theoretical construct. According to the first conception, the structure is the 'idea' of the object, a structure an sich which defines the object as a whole. The second interpretation results in considering a structure as a construction, based on specific aspects of a given object and in accordance with explicit theoretical criteria. The structure has to be related to a set of methodological procedures so that the constructed structure can be tested in relation to the object. Raymond Boudon (1968) characterizes the first conception as an 'intentional' context for a definition of structure, the second as an 'effective' context. The basic presupposition in the first case is this: any object has an essential form which can be revealed. In the second case the assumption is weaker: there are phenomena which, to a certain extent, contain aspects which can be systematized. A 'structure' is one of several possible 'specifications' of this generally presupposed structurability which Boudon calls the 'object-system.' Although both conceptions have been part of semiotics, the latter is the more predominant. In the effective context, four different types of object-systems can be specified as structures. First, there are systems constituted by interrelated elements with finite definitions, such as the elements of the Indo-European vowel system, or of the system of possible marriages in a South American Indian tribe, depending on kinship relations. The construction of a specific structure of vowels or of marriages can be tested directly or empirically in the linguistic and social reality. A second type of object-system contains elements defined by an infinite number of features only delimited ad hoc. This is the case when, for example, a structure is ascribed to a population in an opinion poll during an election campaign, or to the semantic reservoir of a language. But still the structure can be empirically tested. The traditional literary genres exemplify a third type of object-system. Like the first type, this one has a finite number of distinctive features according to specific literary theories. However, a structure of genres in a given historical period will be subject to an indirect test, because the absence of a given genre or subgenre or the occurrence of literary works which do not belong to any genre, will not falsify the structural analysis, which is concerned with the predominant tendency or possible trends of literature. Finally, if the psychoanalytical specification of the structure of associative networks in the human mind is taken into account, for example, we will meet the result of an analysis of a fourth type of object-system. It is defined by an infinite number of distinctive features and is only liable to indirect proof. The classical notion of structure as a closed network of interdependent elements only covers the first type, and cannot, in semiotics, be identified with structure as such. However, it has been the basis of a widespread 'methodological' approach in semiotics: given one basic semiotic system, e.g., verbal language, others, like film, kinship relations, architecture, etc., will be conceived of as being 'analogous' to this system. This analogy permits the methods of structural linguistics in particular to be applied directly to the other systems in question. However, when semiotics investigates all four types of object-systems, it cuts across epistemological as well as methodological borderlines. With the existence of an object-system, and thus of an s-coded phenomenon, as a basic assumption for the construction of structural specifications, semiotics is based on a 'soft' epistemology: semiotics argues neither for a pure nominalism (there is a radically arbitrary relation between structure and object), nor for a pure realism (the identity of the structure is derived from the identity of the object); neither does semiotics adopt a purely extensional view of the object (through the structure the object is identified as a member of a class of objects, the extension of the structure), nor a purely intensional view (the structure characterizes the object through the organization of its supposedly relevant features). Semiotics will assume a predominantly realistic and intensional attitude, because certain properties are presupposed as real, and because they are taken to be relevant for the production of meaning. With regard to methods, semiotics often has to face objects which manifest several of the four types of object-systems at the same time, e.g., a theater performance or aspects of urban culture. Hence, semiotics will have to work with a plurality of methods in an interdisciplinary perspective without giving absolute priority to one single semiotic system as a master system or to the methods connected with that system. On the other hand, structures in which the 'sign' is essential will play the leading role. 1.3 Sign According to the Scholastic definition of the sign, a sign occurs when aliquidstat pro aliquo. This statement was valid before the Middle Ages and it still is in the late twentieth century (Rey 1973: 76): a sign is any
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Truth and Meaning object which represents another object. Meaning is the representation of an object in or by another object. The sign or the representing object can have any material manifestation as long as it can fulfill the representational function: a word, a novel, a gesture, a reaction in the brain, a city, etc. On the status of the represented object nothing is made explicit by this definition. It may be material or mental, fictitious or factual, fantasized or real, natural or artificial. From this it follows that something which is a sign in one context may be an object in another and vice versa. Signs do not constitute a class of objects. A sign is a 'functional' unit. Consequently, no object can be pointed out as a sign unless it is integrated in a concrete process, in which more than the sign itself will have to be included in order to actually produce meaning. Only here a concrete distinction and relation between sign and object is established. So, a sign in itself is a 'virtual' unit which is 'realized' in a process creating meaning. This real and coded process is called a 'semiosis.' In a semiosis, one infers something from a phenomenon one thus considers as a sign, concerning something else, the object. Through this inference, the relation between sign and object is specified according to a code on the basis of certain presuppositions. Some of these presuppositions are derived from the notions of code and structure: there must be distinguishable elements at hand which show systematically organized features. Semiotics never starts ab nihilo, but from already existing experience, investigating how it works and how it can be reworked through semiosis. Here the inferential specification manifests itself in new signs, referring to already existing sign-object relations. The semiosis is a continuous process of sign production. In the history of semiotics, two strategies have been followed in order to define this process. In agreement with the first one, the representational relation is conceived of as secondary to the sign itself. This is the formal tradition which emphasizes the role of the formal properties of the sign itself. In this tradition, the main purpose is to produce an immanent analysis of the manifestations of specific sign systems, e.g., verbal texts, in an attempt to generalize the formal properties of the particular sign system to be valid for semiotic structures as such. The second strategy, in contrast to the formal one, stresses the representational function as constitutive for the sign. This is the pragmatic tradition which focuses on the sign-object relation without paying much attention to the specificity of particular sign systems. Here the semiotic theory is a 'general' theory of signs, trying to reach an understanding of the concrete functioning of any particular sign system. 1.3.1 The Formal Tradition The origin of the formal tradition is, first of all, structural linguistics, especially as laid out by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) in particular. Here the linguistic sign is the point of departure for the semiotic generalization. The basic quality of a sign as a semiotic entity is its relative autonomy or arbitrariness vis-avis the object and the immanent dichotomization of the sign in expression and content. Each of the two sign components is built up by clusters of features, through the combination of which the phonetic and the semantic units respectively are coded as formal units. The identity of the units of the expression component is exclusively defined by the mutual relations between them. The specific totality of these relations is the structure of the component. The same goes for the identity of the units and for the structure of the content component. A sign is created through the relation between the two components. According to this definition, a chess piece which is only used in order to play chess is not a sign, because there is no difference between expression and content: the content is the coded moves and the expression is the same coded moves. According to Andre Martinet (1908- ) such an element is said to have only one articulation. A linguistic sign, however, has a double articulation: in a chain of signs there is a first articulation to articulate them according to their content; the separate signs have a second articulation according to the specific system of expression used. In a semiotic perspective, any sign is defined, totally or partially, through a double articulation which produces an asymmetry between the two levels of articulation. A one-to-one relation between all units of the two components, as with the chess piece, will never occur. Following the formal tradition it is the double articulation that gives rise to representation. The chess piece, in the context referred to above, does not represent anything except itself. In a genuine sign, however, the double articulation forces us to unite expression and content through a specific mental act, an inference or interpretation, by Saussure called an association. As the associative inference cannot be located exclusively in the expression or in the content, representation is a derived effect of the double articulation of the sign which creates an object relation. Meaning is the representational effect produced and conditioned exclusively by the immanent properties of the sign. The order of things and the structure of experience is an effect of the sign structure. The claim of this tradition is that the s-codes and the codes of the immanent structure of the sign are generally valid irrespective of the specific system of expression used. When two components are united through a double articulation, that is a sign which may be manifested in any medium such as the visual, the gestural, or the architectonic. The analysis of such sign systems that are formally identical with verbal language is carried out using the, same methods as are applied in linguistics. Thus, the strategy for the

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semiotic generalization of the properties of the basic sign system is a methodological analogy. 1.3.2 The Pragmatic Tradition In contrast to this tradition, the 'pragmatic' tradition is not concerned with the internal structure of the sign itself, and is therefore indifferent as to the specific medium of the sign. The sign is never seen in abstraction from the sign-object relation which is assumed to constitute the sign. In the pragmatic perspective, the main focus of interest is the way this relation is incorporated into the semiosis. The theoretical background of this tradition is, first and foremost, philosophy and logic with Charles Sanders Peirce (18391914) in particular, but also Karl Biihler (1879-1963) among the leading figures. For pragmatic semioticians, the formal properties of the sign will not suffice to define it. The definition of the sign must include elements necessary to explain the use of the sign with regard to the object: the status of the object will have to be taken into account (real, fictitious, etc.) as well as the purposiveness of the sign process; the assumed properties of the sign in relation to the object (similarity, copresence, difference, etc.) as well as the types of code involved (mental, material, strategical, etc.) must be dealt with. From the pragmatic point of view, the semiosis is the 'integration' of an object into a sign process in such a way that new knowledge concerning the object can be manifested in a new sign, which may be a word, an act, an image, etc. In the formal tradition the goal is different. Here the construction of an autonomous sign or structure of signs conveys an 'arbitrary layout' to the object. If the object is the history of Europe, a sign may be a book, an exhibition, or a movie giving a specific version of this history which, in turn, makes us produce a new sign, e.g., the participation in a peace demonstration, the writing of a new book, the establishing of a new political party or just a psychological reaction of joy or frustration. As an effect of the first sign, each of these new signs establishes a relation to the same object on a new basis. From a formal point of view the most important question which arises from this example is how the structure of the original sign, as it occurs in a specific system or systems of expression, creates a specific object. If any new sign is produced, the next question will be how the structure of this sign, related to its system of expression, forms an object. The pragmatic approach, on the other hand, looks for how the new sign comes into being as an effect of the manifestation of the first one. Here the transformation or translation between signs and sign systems, irrespective of their material specificity, is the pivotal point of the analysis. Meaning in the pragmatic context is this effect as embedded in a continuous sign production creating new object relations. The two traditions have different problems to face in an application outside linguistics and philosophy, but they both attempt to cooperate with other disciplines. The formal tradition is anchored in the analysis of a specific sign system and thus it possesses strong methodological and applicative resources, which in fact have given this tradition a great deal of impact. But the strategy of seeing other sign systems as analogous to verbal language may underestimate the particular semiotic capacities of nonverbal sign systems. Guided by the pragmatic tradition, the overall general logic of the semiosis forces us to concentrate on how different sign systems work together. This interest has broadened the scope of semiotics. But being neutral to the specific medium of the sign, this tradition sees no necessary link between the general structure of semiosis and the particular sign systems engaged in the semiosis. Hence, there are no precise analytical tools left for the understanding of specific sign processes. A common focal point for the two traditions is the conception of the semiotic inference from sign to object or from expression to content as more comprehensive than logical inference. The goal of any semiotic process is meaning and not logical truth value, which is only one specific type of meaning, integrated in more important and multidimensional effects of meaning produced by the semiotic activity of everyday life. This being the case, the inferential process can never be reduced to a formal structure alone, but contains necessarily nonformal elements which define it as a 'discourse.' 1.4 Discourse Through the notion of discourse, the semiotic inference is comprehended as an act, implying first of all a specific 'orientation' and a mark of'subjectivity.' 'Intentionality' in general is defined by phenomenology as the capacity of any consciousness to be a consciousness about something. The mind is constituted by its always being oriented towards an object, which is totally unspecified except for being positioned in relation to the mind. In the discourse, consciousness, abstractly comprehended as intentionality, is embedded in a concrete sign process which is the starting point for the semiotic analysis of intentionality. In order to be realized as a unity creating meaning, any sign has to be a link in a chain of signs, organized in an irreversible order which is oriented toward an object. From a semiotic point of view, even an anaphoric reference to a previous sign in a syntagmatic chain will contribute to the general irreversibility of the chain, because the anaphora takes place as a production of a new sign, thus basically a movement ahead. This irreversible intentional order is the discourse. In this perspective, intentionality acquires a more differentiated definition than in philosophy or in

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Truth and Meaning descriptions of explicitly purposive instrumental acts. First, there is the 'general' intentionality, because any process of creating meaning is directed towards an object in order to be meaning productive at all. This goes for animals and machines as well as for human beings. Second, there is the 'subjective' intentionality, giving the fact that there is consciousness or human subjectivity involved. Third, we orient ourselves in accordance with the 'ontologicar status of the object, the specific type of reality it presumably belongs to (dream, reality, etc.). Fourth, we have a 'specifying' intentionality which is inherent in the fact that a semiosis is aiming at identifying or giving a specific meaning to the intended object, e.g., in the semantic structure of a given sign system. Fifth, a discourse carries an instrumental purposiveness, a 'strategic' intentionality. In the discourse, all these types of intentionality work together so that virtual signs are realized in an 'act.' The turning point is subjectivity. In the discourse the communicating subject is located in relation to other subjects and in relation to the referential dimension. This situating function is brought about by specific elements in the sign system which carry out this situational function, viz. the 'deictic' elements. Through these elements, e.g., a blast of a horn, a twitch of the eye, subjects and objects are located in time and space in relation to the semiosis. In verbal language, for example, pronouns, certain adverbs, forms of conjugation, are deictic elements; in a film, camera angle or perspective may carry this function; in gestural language, nodding and pointing may exercise deictic functions, etc. No system of elements can be a sign system without deictic elements, and each system is characterized by its particular deictic devices. Systems without deictic elements, like a set of chess pieces, will have to be embedded into semiotic sign systems, like language or gestures, in order to function in a process which creates meaning, e.g., a game one practices to win. In this way the discourse is framed by a 'discursive universe' for the semiosis. The discursive universe is the set of'presuppositions' which situates the semiosis in relation to subjects and objects in such a way that a semiosis can take place 'concerning these subjects and objects.' To put it in a less abstract way: the discursive universe is a shared cultural knowledge and experience which is involved in the semiosis, but which we do not need to make explicit. It is the context necessary for the understanding of the outcome of a semiosis. All the five aspects of intentionality are not listed explicitly when signs are used in a discursive process. But whenever one says 'Look!,' any understanding of this utterance implies that we agree that we have an object outside the speaker; that we communicate to other subjects; that we are looking for something real we want to identify, unless we are explicitly informed
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otherwise. On the basis of these presuppositions we may want to make certain intentional aspects explicit, e.g., the purpose for the outcry, and ask 'Why?' The discursive universe is a 'shared' and thus social universe of already existing and accepted knowledge about what we consider a 'possible' world which we make 'real' in producing 'collective' or 'intersubjectively' 'valid' signs about it. The discourse makes the semiosis a 'communicative' act: the semiosis becomes a sign process between subjects about their world. This act is realized in 'texts'. 7.5 Text The compound of actually realized signs, filtered through the discursive logic of intentionality, is a 'text.' The text might seem the most self-evident of the semiotic key notions: the material manifestation of signs, especially verbal signs. But it has in fact received different definitions and has been used on different levels of argumentation. In Louis Hjelmslev's (1899-1965) linguistic version of the formal tradition, the text is the infinite chain of realized signs. The signs themselves are entities defined by elements in finite structures which are realized in the text. From the point of view of text 'production,' the text is the result of a code engendering an endless number of sign combinations based on a selection among a limited repertoire of sign components. From the 'reception' perspective, the text requires segmentation in delimited individual texts, according to certain methodological criteria which can separate textual features which are pertinent for the sign system in itself, from other features, e.g., genres or rhetorical elements. In this perspective, the discursive intentionality and the problem of contextualization are not taken into account. But on the other hand, the sign system as a stock of possibilities for an infinite sign production is important for semiotics. When this conception is generalized in semiotics, other sign systems are dealt with as analogous with language. This means that other semiotic systems produce an endless text in the same material space as language, and that they have to be received according to the same analytical linguistic procedures. In this way, the entire world of human activity is turned into one global text or intertextual compound of texts. The globalization of the text removes it from the position as a material object which is accessible through specific methods, and turns it into a general notion concerning the status of objects in the world of human activity: they are all texts. Hence, on the methodological level the formal tradition can only make prescientific distinctions between texts according to the immediately perceived differences between expression systems: visual texts, verbal texts, gestural texts, etc. The pragmatic tradition, too, also has its problems with the apparently simple notion of text. Here the

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notion of sign is not bound to a specific system of expression, so there is no distinction between sign and text on the empirical level: a book can be a sign in itself or be looked upon as being built by signs; a city can be regarded as one single sign or it can be seen as a text constituted by a complex networks of signs. So, in this tradition distinctions also have to be made ad hoc between signs and texts and between texts according to the context and to the goal of the analysis. But as signs in the pragmatic tradition are defined according to the inferential semiotic process, the whole range of discursive elements are also part of the sign definition. So, we will have at our disposal concepts outside the sign system, but inside the semiosis, to operate a distinction between texts. Seen in this light, everything is a possible text or sign, but not everything has the status of text or sign at the same time, i.e., not everything serves the concrete production of meaning in the actual semiosis. In any concrete semiosis we have a text: a delimited material manifestation of signs containing elements (a) which are necessary to operate a distinction between text and nontext, and (b) which are necessary to draw the line between presupposed elements and explicit elements in the text in order to produce an understanding of its meaning. In a theater performance, everything on stage is part of a text in a complex network of individual sign systems. In everyday communication, words, gestures, facial expression, etc. as a whole make up a text. In both cases we have neutral elements which do not partake in the semiosis: they are not coded by the scodes involved in the text in question. The architectural construction of the room or the clothing worn during the communication is irrelevant to the text, not because they do not belong to the sign systems in question, as a partisan of the formal tradition would have stated, but because they do not contribute to the semiosis. On the other hand, they can be integrated in the semiosis: the director can use the auditorium as part of the theatrical space of the performance and the limits between text and nontext may even change during the performance; the interlocutors can dress in a way which improves or deliberately interrupts the communication. Certain elements can never be part of the text: parts of the body of the actor will never be coded as signs (illness, sexual dispositions, etc.) and will impose definite limits on the text; during the conversation the telephone may ring or a third person may turn on the radio so that the interlocutors cannot hear one word. These are all elements which are not part of the text as an 'intentional discursive phenomenon,' but they may be components of other texts, and they definitely mark the limits of a text. No text can ever be infinite from this point of view, but the text itself will contain a level of presupposed elements which are necessary for the existence of the text as a discursive phenomenon. The presupposed elements which can be made explicit by the text, belong to the text, e.g., a theatrical metafiction with an autoreferential dimension may integrate auditorium, audience, technical staff, etc. in the text. Other presupposed aspects, like the actors' salaries, the state of the buildings, the budget of the house, etc. belong to other texts. This means that no text is self-sufficient in a kind of immanent infinity. When one cannot express oneself well enough in an oral verbal text, one can use gestures to compensate. This new verbal-gestural text as a whole now produces one meaning in an intersemiotic textual totality. In this way, signs and texts necessarily partake in a continuous semiosis through which the limits between texts and between presupposed and explicit elements are constantly moving. Signs are always meant to be transformed into other signs of similar or different types. The text is the materialization of this transformation. 2. Semiotic Schools Semiotics has been institutionalized worldwide in many national associations, which communicate in journals and newsletters of more or less limited distribution. All of them are united under the umbrella of the International Association of Semiotic Studies, with Semiotica as its official journal. There are a number of centers and departments at institutions of higher education around the world offering semiotics programs on all levels, mostly integrated in more extensive programs. Apart from this administrative institutionalization, semiotics is guided by the concepts and ideas developed in four major schools. 2.1 Structuralist Semiotics Structuralist semiotics was inaugurated by Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de linguistique generate (1916) and further developed especially by Louis Hjelmslev's glossematic theory and Algirdas Julien Greimas's (1917-1992) structural semantics in particular. Saussure sets out to define linguistics as a specific science by assigning a specific object to it, the particular aspect of language which can only be dealt with by linguistics. The genuine object of linguistics is the language 'system,' the closely interrelated structure of elements that are different from the individual use of language, which it determines in such a way that it becomes an understandable chain of meaning carrying verbal unities, signs, and not just a series of sound waves. Although they are parts of language as a global phenomenon, the sociological, physiological, psychological, or aesthetic aspects of language can be left to other disciplines: they are not the differentia specifica of verbal production of meaning. The aim of this project is not to isolate linguistics from other sciences and its object from other sign
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Truth and Meaning systems, but to give a precise outline of linguistics and defining language both as a specific structure in its its object in such a way that, from the particularity of own right, depending on the specificity of the relations language and linguistics, the general aspects of sign involved, and as an example of a general sign strucsystems and the general guidelines for the study of ture. This is due to the fact that value is a formal such systems can be developed. Language has to be notion, indifferent to how it is materialized and to seen as a particular sign system and linguistics has to the character of the objects it represents, so that any be seen as a branch of semiotics, which Saussure him- system that acts like language in any medium and referring to any object, can be studied as a quasiself calls 'semiology.' With the notion of sign as the heart of linguistics, linguistic sign system. With an extension of one of Saussure's own examand with 'dichotomization' as the basic analytical device, Saussure sorts out the conceptual framework ples: the 8.45 pm train from Paris to Geneva is defined of linguistics in order to make the semiotic perspective in relation to other trains as listed in the timetable, possible. In a series of dichotomies, the opposition not with regard to the specific carriages used at any between system and use being the basic one, he defines specific moment. The timetable is the paradigmatic a number of dimensions and elements of the language order, the organization of carriages with the engine in system, so that its internal structure of elements is front is the syntagmatic chain. Changes in the timeconstitutive for the sign. From a semiotic point of table or in the position of the engine, depending on view, the most important among these dichotomies technological developments for example, will be a diaare those immediately connected with the sign, i.e., chronical study of the Paris-Geneva transportation the distinction between the sign components, 'sig- system, while the analysis of what is going on with nifier' and 'signified,' the sign levels, 'form' and 'sub- regard to rail traffic between the two cities in the 1970s stance,' the distinction between the principles for the will constitute a synchronical investigation. In Louis Hjelmslev's glossematics, the semiotic key linkage of signs, 'paradigmatic' and 'syntagmatic' order, and, finally, the opposition between the two notions are 'form' and 'hierarchy.' Saussure regards methodological viewpoints, 'synchrony' and 'di- form, grosso modo, as equivalent to independence of substance, while Hjelmslev takes form to mean what achrony.' can be formalized according to formal logic. Formal The identity of a signifier or of a signified is its relation, i.e., its simultaneous difference and simi- elements are elements which are exclusively defined larity, to other signifiers and signifieds. This relational by their reciprocal or unilateral relation to other identity is the 'value' of the signifying and signified elements. The sign is also a type of reciprocal relation, unit. The identity of the signifiers is not bound to the called the 'sign function,' between two units, the material character of the expression, and the identity 'expression plane' and the 'content plane.' Elements formal of the signifieds does not depend on the quality of which are related by concurrence alone have no defined definition. In this way, the formal structure is the signified objects. Through the value of the sign only by these two types of formal relation. components, a sign as a whole is then defined as a This formalistic or algebraic interpretation of Saus'formal' and not as a 'substantial' entity: its identity sure puts further constraints on the basic analytical depends on its relation to other signs in the same principle of dichotomization, in order to set up the system of expression. Thus, a radical or epis- final object description. The analysis is carried out as temological arbitrariness between sign and object is a division of the object in units which can be related manifested in the sign as an internal arbitrariness and thus defined and only defined by the formal between signifier and signified. relations. This will lead to a noncontradictory object There are two kinds of arbitrariness working in description. The analysis is exhaustive when all cooperation in the sign system according to two rules elements which are only characterized as concurrent of combination. A combination of signs or sign com- are left out. They do not belong to the formal descripponents can be 'syntagmatic,' i.e., bound to a sequen- tion even if they can be repeated, e.g., the quality of tial determination or relative arbitrariness, e.g., sir- at Humphrey Bogart's voice, which is always concurrent the beginning of an English syllable must be followed with the verbal signs he utters. If more than one by a vowel. If the combination of signs or sign com- exhaustive description is possible, the simplest is to be ponents indicates simultaneous but alternating possi- preferred. With this notion of form, Hjelmslev has bilities (as does the nominal case system), we have contributed considerably to the methodological devela 'paradigmatic' organization, based upon absolute opment of semiotics. arbitrariness. Even if the concurrent elements are excluded from Any system built upon arbitrarily combined signs one sign system, they may acquire a formal definition or sign components can be studied from two view- by the description of another sign system. Thus, the points, the historical or 'diachronical,' or the 'syn- rigid formalism opens a hierarchy of interrelated semichronical,' i.e., that of a certain frozen situation. otic levels. Hjelmslev's vision is a complete structure With the notion of value as the key to the whole of sign systems referring to each other in order to theory as a semiotic theory, Saussure succeeds in create form out of substance on a global scale.
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The basic molecule of the hierarchy consists of several sign systems: first, we have a 'denotative' language, constituted by the sign function and thus having an expression plane and a content plane, e.g., the language used by Humphrey Bogart when he orders a scotch on the rocks in a bar. Second, we have a 'metalanguage' which contains an exhaustive formal description of this language as English, thus having the entire denotative language as its content plane and the glossematic description as the expression plane. Also, glossematics will contain nonformal elements, i.e., certain indefinable elements which can be integrated in a 'meta-metalanguage' and there be given a formal definition, i.e., in a nonlinguistic science (philosophy, logic, mathematics, etc.). This language will constitute a third step. Now, if the metalanguage has left out what is only concurrent in the denotative language, there will be the possibility that another type of metalanguage, called the 'connotative' language, will deal with those formal leftovers. Such a language will have the entire denotative language as its expression plane and also comprise, for example, the quality of Humphrey Bogart's almost mythological voice as a condition for a specific content which is more comprehensive than the whisky as such ordered by the movie star, it is the-scotch-ordered-by-Humphrey-Bogart. This additional creation of meaning can roughly be characterized as 'symbolic' and allows for a new metalanguage that can provide us with a formal description ad modum glossematicum of this enlarged meaning, i.e., an analysis of aesthetic, ideological, or mythological effects. The connotative language is parallel to the metalanguage. The hierarchical relation between the denotative language, the metalanguage, and the connotative language with its progress to higher levels has enlarged the possibilities in structural semiotics to take into account a multileveled production of meaning. After the publication of A. J. Greimas's Semantique structural (1966), the ideas of structuralist semiotics have had an impact on a variety of subdisciplines of semiotics: literary studies, film studies, anthropology, art history, architecture, etc. Especially in France, Denmark, Spain, Italy, Canada, Brazil (and now also in the USA), an ongoing application and reworking of notions are taking place. 2.2 Phenomenological Semiotics Semioticians inspired by phenomenology can hardly be said to form a school. What they have in common is the application of notions and ideas from Edmund Husserl's (1859-1938) phenomenology, particularly as expounded in his Logische Untersuchungen (190001). They belong to a great variety of disciplines, and except for the activities of the Prague School between the two wars, they never formed a group. In the Prague group, influential personalities were Jan Mukafovsky (1891-1975), Karl Btihler (1879-1963) and Roman Jakobson (1896-1982). Husserl himself was not primarily preoccupied with semiotic questions, but with the traditional philosophical problem of how to obtain true knowledge. In order to reach that goal, we have to direct our consciousness toward the objects; we have to express this relation in signs; and, finally, we have to acknowledge that objectivity is based on certain structural principles. This argument leads to the introduction of three semiotically relevant key notions: 'intentionality,' 'sign,' and 'foundation.' Husserl wants to use these notions to go beyond the realm of the sign to the truth of the object. The purpose of semiotics, on the other hand, is to study the domain of the sign with the sign as its object, to see how the sign is founded, and to see how intentionality works in a sign process to create meaning. As this endeavor is only an intermediary step in Husserl's research, the reference to Husserl in phenomenological semiotics is always selective and often indirect. He indicates a horizon for the semiotic research interest. Husserl introduces two types of signs: first, the 'indication,' which is a sign that points to a de facto presence of the object, without attributing any content to it—the noise from an unidentified thing approaching you; second, the 'expression' in which a mind makes clear that it has been oriented towards an object—a shout like 'Watch out!' accompanied by a nodding head and a pointing finger. Here, the sign-object relation is rooted in a subjectivity, or to put it less phenomenologically: somebody wants to say something to somebody. Now, the point is that this combination of sign and intentionality as a communicative intersubjectivity is not in the first place an act of deliberate will. It is made possible by the fact that the sign is 'founded,' i.e., it belongs to a structure of relations, called a pure logical grammar, through which it is constituted as a specific type of object, namely as capable of carrying intentionality in intersubjective communication. The notion of foundation is adapted by the Prague School as the notion of structure. When Husserl's discussion of the sign is transferred to linguistics or other disciplines with a semiotic perspective, it is obvious that a sign structure can never be interpreted as an immanent formal structure. In the structure, the sign occupies the position of an intermediary instance in a communicative and referential structure, and the grammar of any sign system will have to pay special attention to elements which articulate the communicative functions, such as deictic elements. This is what happens in Karl Buhler's so-called organon model (Sprachtheorie 1934). Here the sign is the 'organon' or medium through which an expressive relation to the sender, an appellative relation to the
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Truth and Meaning receiver, and a representative relation to an object are present 'simultaneously' in order to create meaning. The precondition for the transformation of a material object into a sign is the 'abstractive relevance': Any sign-object, e.g., a gesture, has to be structured in such a way that we are able to retain only the features that are relevant for its meaningcreating function. This capacity of the subject and these objectively manifested features must be part of a collectively shared consensus, i.e., be founded in a formal grammar. From this argument Buhler is led to the seminal idea of phonology as an independent study of the structure of such features, which are formal in the sense that they are conditions for the function of sounds as differentiating meaning, but which are not formalistic in the sense that they are defined only through their internal organization. Roman Jakobson develops Buhler's simple, phenomenologically based communication model into a more differentiated structure with more than three functional relations. One of these relations is of special semiotic interest: the so-called 'poetic' function. This is the function through which the sign is related to itself, the sign represents itself as an object within the communicative structure as a whole. In verbal language, this function can be specified as a transformation of syntagmatic relations into paradigmatic ones. As soon as a work of art is apprehended, it is in a way frozen as one set of simultaneously interrelated elements, in spite of the fact that it is perceived as a sequential order. In a novel the beginning and the end are directly connected once the reading is over. This idea emerged among the Russian formalists, a group of linguists, literary scholars, poets, and artists, who worked together just before World War I. Parallel to Saussure, they tried to define the study of art as a specific scholarly activity based on the specific artistic character of its object, especially its 'literarity.' This phenomenon was seen as the specific set of devices (rhyme, narrative structure, genre structures, etc.) through which the material aspect of the artistic object is given its specific artistic character as opposed to the ordinary use of the same material, e.g., artistic language as opposed to everyday language. Hence, taken as art, a given object becomes autoreferential. Because the same material is also used outside the artistic context, the effect of the autoreferentiality is not an isolation of the arts, but it is a way of introducing new meaning in the ordinary context. The artistic function always works together with other communicative functions and with other sign systems. The specificity of the artistic object, and of any other object as a sign, is the devices it provides us with to carry out this intersemiotic relation. This conception of aesthetics was taken up in Prague by Mukafovsky, among others, and a semiotics of the arts (literature, theater, folklore, film, etc.)
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was created with ideas which are still active in semiotics. Jakobson's contribution was to combine the ideas of Russian formalism and the Prague School with essential aspects of structuralist semiotics, without being taken in by its hard-core formalism. Another link between phenomenology and structural semiotics is established on a philosophical level in the grammatological analysis of the sign as inaugurated by Jacques Derrida (1930- ) in his De la grammatologie (1967) and in the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur (1913- ) in Le Conflit des Interpretations (1969). Ricoeur criticizes the rigid notion of structure behind the structuralist sign notion. It produces a biased view on the concrete sign process, which in his work is seen as a concrete event where several interpretations of the world meet, e.g., in metaphors and symbols, and not simply as a manifestation of a transindividual structure. Derrida is more oriented toward the epistemological aspects of the structuralist sign notion: according to him, this notion implies the existence of a transcendental meaning that can be reached through the sign which is regarded as transparent vis-a-vis the virtual structure. But he also points out that this transcendental meaning has to be expressed in signs. The only mode of existence of what is beyond the sign, is the signs in which this beyond is expressed. This paradox is the creative dynamics of all texts. No text will ever express a conclusive meaning, but will always produce a continuous dissolution or 'deconstruction' of stable meanings. While Ricoeur anchors structuralist semiotics in the hermeneutical tradition, Derrida's work has inspired a philosophical relativism characterized as postmodern, deconstructionist, or poststructuralist. But as a whole, phenomenological semiotics is a broadly and culturally oriented movement which is still developing and focusing on how human beings are determined by signs. 2.3 American Semiotics North American semiotics as a school is identical with Peircean semiotics, rooted in the works of Charles Sanders Peirce. Other types of semiotic activities in the USA are of non-American origin, being of structuralist or postmodern inspiration. Peirce is a polyhistorian with logic as the center of his thought; logic considered as the way of reasoning about the world through the manipulation of signs which represent this world. So, for Peirce, logic is semiotics. Like Husserl, he is inspired by the medieval schoolmen and he adopts a phenomenological point of departure for his semiotics. In Peirce, the core of semiotics is the 'semiosis' or the structured process in which the 'sign' imposes a 'coded relation' to an 'object' on a mind. Behind this triadic notion of semiosis are three basic phenom-

Semiotics
enologically conceived 'modes of being' of objects in relation to the mind. There is the mode of 'firstness,' the object as it is in itself as a virtuality; there is the mode of 'secondness' or the actually existing object as different from and opposed to the mind and to other objects; finally, there is the mode of 'thirdness' where the object is presented according to a law which makes it accessible to recognition. Semiosis is the process governed by thirdness. The constitutive triad of the semiosis is the sign, the 'interpretant' or the coded relation, and the object. So, all signs are objects which function as instances of thirdness; they are liable to abstractive relevance, as Biihler would say. The particularity of the sign in the semiosis depends on the sign-object relation inside the triadic relation. If this relation is based on 'similarity' between sign and object, i.e., expresses firstness, we have an 'iconic' sign. As the sign is part of a triadic structure, the similarity is not immediate, but coded as a specific similarity (spatial, oral, visual, olfactory, etc.). When the foundation of a sign-object relation is 'copresence,' the sign manifests 'secondness' and is called an 'indexicaF sign (a pointing finger, the smoke of a fire, an outcry caused by pain, etc.). Finally, a sign-object relation may be established according to 'convention' and thus express 'thirdness,' which produces a 'symbolic' sign (a linguistic sign, gestures of politeness, etc.). Being an instance of thirdness in the semiosis, which is thirdness as a process, the symbolic sign is the most complete sign of the three types of signs. The symbolic sign is similar to the arbitrary sign in Saussure and is also bound to a collectively shared structure of understanding. But it can never be isolated in the semiosis from manifestations of the other types of sign. Any semiosis is a compound of iconic, indexical, and symbolic signs: the indexical sign aspects establish a relation to an object, the iconic sign aspects open for analogies which are essential to our everyday behavior when we imitate former experience, and the symbolic sign aspects produce coded knowledge on which we can agree or disagree and reach new knowledge. No sign aspects can be disposed of. So, Peirce's semiotics is close to the phenomenological insistance on the whole dialogical structure of semiosis. In being object-related, Peirce's sign is also close to the expression in Husserl's theory. Like Husserl, Peirce introduces a differentiation of 'objects': first, the 'dynamical' object, which is the object outside the semiosis towards which this process is directed, posed by the semiosis as its goal, but neither formed nor determined by it. Second, the 'immediate' object which is the object as represented in the semiosis, e.g., as expressed in the semantic structure of a language. The demarcation line between the two dimensions of the object is the result of the semiosis and it is constantly replaced by the semiotic activity when knowledge is created. The 'interpretant' is the cornerstone of Peirce's semiotics. It is the code or law through which sign and object are related so that an effect of the semiosis can occur. It is not an imitation of an immanent structure of the sign or of the object, and it is not an arbitrary structure imposed on the object from the outside. The interpretant is the law which is made necessary by the sign-object relation in order to give this relation a generally valid character. The interpretant is an 'effect' of the sign-object relation, determined by it and, in turn, specifying it. That the relation is generally valid means that it can be subsumed under a law which can be agreed upon and repeated. So, the mode of being of an interpretant will be the 'habits' according to which we actually deal with the object. These habits will be manifested as signs in other semioses and reinterpreted and perhaps changed. The interpretant creates new signs and thus a continuous semiosis. The interpretant as an effect has three aspects: the 'immediate' interpretant is the presupposed organized character of the object which make the application of a law possible, what Boudon calls the object-system. The 'dynamical' interpretant is the delimited effect, a concrete physical or mental act performed by somebody or something as the result of the sign-object relation. The 'final' interpretant will be this act regarded as the general truth about the object, such as a law which is a universally valid guideline for a habitual act, i.e., a way of reasoning in mathematics, independently of any individual subject. The connection between semiosis and habits made Peirce call his semiotics 'pragmatism.' The dynamical interpretant is of particular semiotic interest, because it is this effect which is the motor of the semiosis. If a driver is waiting in a lane in front of a traffic light, ready to continue when the light is green, the traffic light will be the sign and the traffic the dynamical object. The immediate object will be the representation of the traffic in the sign systems known by the driver (urban phenomenon, regulated by law, dangerous, etc.). The rules which regulate the traffic through the traffic light (stop, go, wait, etc.) will be the interpretant. The object has presumably a certain order which makes it reasonable to learn and to obey the traffic light. This preconception of the object as structurable will be the immediate interpretant. The final interpretant, i.e., the ideal and universal organization of traffic is of mainly theoretical interest, but it is a working concept in functionalist urban planning, for example. From this perspective, the dynamical interpretant will be the act which incorporates the code: as soon as the light turns green, the driver manipulates his car and off he goes. This interpretant is manifested in the semiosis as a new sign, the moving car, which in turn may be interpreted in relation to the same object by the drivers further down the lane who cannot see the traffic light: they turn on their engines, ready to go. If
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Truth and Meaning a driver had started while the light was red, his act would still have been a dynamical interpretant, but a police officer might have stopped him, taking it as a sign related to the same dynamical object but representing another immediate object. In this case, the traffic would no longer be a practical affair but a legal complex. Because of the generality of Peirce's thought and its comprehensive character, bridging the gap between profound epistemological viewpoints, cultural and historical problems, and particular types of signs and sign processes in different disciplines, it has had an immense influence in all semiotic domains. The tripartition of signs has been the emblem of his semiotics and has been used to characterize sign processes of all types and in all kinds of expression systems. And his emphasis on the dialogical structure of the semiosis and of the shared knowledge presupposed by the semiosis, has led to penetrating studies in philosophical and literary hermeneutics or in anthropology and the social sciences (e.g., Singer 1984). But in most cases the generality also means a lack of specific analytical devices, so that the application of Peirce's notions is normally integrated as specifying guidelines for a methodological pluralism. In this capacity, Peirce's semiotics has a global influence as well as a growing one. 2.4 The Moscow-Tartu School With the Moscow-Tartu School, a school in the literal sense of the word was established. Founded in 1962, it continues the cooperation between the Slavic countries and the other countries on the European continent which dates back to Saussure and his foundation of structural linguistics, to Russian formalism, and to the Prague School. Among the leading figures are Jurij Lotman (1922-1993) from Tartu and Vjaceslav Ivanov (1929-1993) from Moscow. Although the activities of the school have several sources of inspiration, structuralist semiotics is the most decisive: the Saussurean sign and the Hjelmslevian hierarchy (see Grzybek 1989). On the basis of these fundamentals, the ambition is to focus on more complex sign structures than verbal language and to transform the basic notions and methods of the linguistically based structural semiotics beyond a mere analogy. Hence, the main interest of the school is the study of 'culture' as a semiotic system. The basic notions are 'text' and 'model.' Culture is based on a process of creation, exchange, and storage of information, and the specific 'unity' of this process is the object of cultural semiotics. The material for this study is the 'text' in which this process materializes, and the 'invariants' which can be found in the texts constitute the ultimate object of cultural semiotics. The text is a megasign, as it were, and is built up of binary signs. In the structuralist sign conception, the invariants are the relationally defined
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elements which constitute the signifier-component and the signified-component. But in the cultural flow of information, the invariants are neither located in the sign itself nor in the text in itself. Therefore, the signifier of the sign is seen as a material unit, not as a formal unit. Furthermore, when the text is seen in analogy with the sign, it is regarded as any delimited material unit with a content that can be divided in smaller units of the same kind. Following this idea, the formal definition of the invariants requires another notion, the notion of 'model.' First of all, the notion of model implies a 'hierarchy' between two levels, a model being a model of something. The invariants are the elements which remain stable when meaning from one level in a hierarchy is transformed to another. Second, the notion of model is necessarily linked to the assumption of a basic 'code' or structure which reworks an object, duplicating or replacing it by a model. In culture the basic object is always a text, dealing with our world of experience, e.g., a linguistic or visual text. The model is another text which uses the first one as expression and which contains the rules by which this expression takes place. This is an application of the connotative hierarchy in Hjelmslev. The point is that any text, also the basic one, in order to be text must be placed in a modeling hierarchy, either as the so-called 'primary modeling system,' e.g., the verbal text which functions as a model of our experience of the world, or as a 'secondary modeling system' which reconstructs the first modeling system's way of systematizing our experience. So, a 'model' is a text considered as an organizing system in relation to another text. From this point of view, the cultural invariants are attached to the text-as-model, functioning in an irreducible double structure consisting of at least two modeling systems. The two systems will never be identical, neither by being identical repetitions nor by being infinite, because texts as models impose limits on the infinite flow of information from the surrounding world. They will be different and often in opposition. The advantage of this approach is that the basic text, the primary modeling system, will be delimited according to the purpose of the analysis, i.e., the relation to another modeling system. Furthermore, in a cultural perspective the text is always linked to a hierarchy which cannot be reduced to a homogeneous whole where the two modeling systems function as one. Thus, culture is always seen as a dynamic intersection or a continuous process of unifying heterogeneous texts. In an analogy to the notion of biosphere, this cultural space is called the 'semiosphere' by Jurij Lotman. With this notion he wants to draw our attention to the fact that the domain of texts, in order to be texts, is always opposed to a domain of phenomena which are not texts. The heterogeneous character of the

Semiotics
semiosphere is a result of the continuous replacement of its limits by the production of texts confronting the nontextual sphere in a ongoing cultural attempt to integrate it into the world of human activity, producing an interior reorganization of this world of activity. 3. Semiotic Domains A survey of the different fields of research in semiotics is given in the general semiotic encyclopedias (Noth 1985; Sebeok (ed.) 1986; Posner (ed.) 1997). Contributions from the humanities (literary studies, epistemology, logic, hermeneutics, aesthetics, architecture, design, linguistics, film studies, musicology, theater studies) are abundant, but the social sciences (mass media studies, communication studies, studies of urban culture and popular culture, cultural anthropology, ideology studies, women's studies, pedagogics, marketing) and psychology (psychoanalysis, cognitive science) are also richly represented, as are theology and law. Less numerous are works in the sciences and medicine (animal communication studies, biology, computer sciences, pathological studies of body signs), but a growing interest is shown in these fields. Many of the separate domains organize the research in special associations with journals and congress activities. 4. Future of Semiotics The late-twentieth-century activities of semiotics in an international perspective indicate at least four main roads for the future progress of semiotics, which will run parallel to a continuous activity in the particular fields of research. 4.1 Cooperation of Schools The historical differences between two basic traditions and between the main semiotic schools will tend to disappear in the years to come: the formal tradition needs the global perspective of the pragmatic tradition which will, in turn, need the detailed knowledge of specific sign systems presented by the formal tradition. The turning point will be the elements in the specific sign systems, which define their particular pragmatic capacity, namely the elements through which any sign system is anchored in a discursive process in relation to other sign systems and to situational conditions. These are the elements carrying the 'indexical or deictic functions,' which will attract increasing attention also inside the specific branches of semiotics. 4.2 Cultural Semiotics There is a growing interest in 'cultural semiotics.' This will encompass the study of whole cultures, such as European culture, or larger segments of culture, like youth culture, as complex sign systems, with a special emphasis on the intercultural dynamic exchange of signs. The endeavor of this study is to cover all cultural activities, from the basic establishment of time and space relations and structures of subjectivity to specific cultural phenomena such as political rhetoric or the arrangement of pedestrian zones, seen in the perspective of meaning production through signs. In this way, semiotics tries to integrate the more specific semiotic studies from recent years in a global perspective. But in the field of cultural studies, semiotics is at the same time constantly confronted with nonsemiotic approaches which are necessary to delimit the texts to be investigated, so that semiotics has now been forced into an open interdisciplinarity, breaking down the walls around semiotics itself. 4.3 Human and Nonhuman Signs Another trend will be the 'combination of human and nonhuman sign production,' be it animal communication or the computerized processing of information. This orientation leads to a reevaluation of the notion of sign and will focus on other types of units which create meaning, like signals, units with one articulation, etc., and it will open to a stronger interest in communicative and informational acts which are not, like the more traditionally conceived interpretation, exclusively bound to doubly articulated signs and complex sign systems. Here an interest in studying the cooperation between signs and nonsigns will emerge. 4.4 Possible Worlds An important aspect of our modern culture which has been permeated by the effects of computer technology, is the way the logical problem of 'possible worlds,' dating back to Leibniz, becomes part of the meaning production, not only in different types of fiction or of logical constructs, but in the process of the planning of the future. We have to be able to construct scenarios for the long-term consequences of things such as the depositing of nuclear waste, of huge climatic changes, of computerized communication processes and their influence on local cultures, etc. We are able to construct such scenarios in great detail, but none of us will live long enough to see if they will ever be real or true. But despite the fact that these possible worlds (or virtual realities) only exist in sign systems, we have, nevertheless, to